


Heavy Petting

by riotcow



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: An unusual amount of cuddling for SM porn, Anthea (Sherlock) is the Best PA, Blood Play, Body Worship, Bondage, Childhood sexual assault, Control Issues, D/s, Daddy/girl, Emotionally repressed control freaks are my kind of guy, Ephebophilia, F/M, Genital Mutilation, Hurt/Comfort, Knife Play, Light Bondage, Lots of literal petting, Masochism, Mycroft has needs too, Mycroft is a Bit Not Good, Mycroft-centric, Oh god the author must be a psychology geek, Oral Sex, Owner/Pet, Sadism, Sexual Slavery, Slow Build, Surgical body modification, Systematic desensitization as kinky sex srsly?, Threat of genital nullification, Top Mycroft, What was the difference between pain and love again?, but not too many, explicit sexual violence, revenge porn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-14
Updated: 2018-05-31
Packaged: 2018-08-08 19:30:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 11
Words: 54,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7770190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/riotcow/pseuds/riotcow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A story about severe abuse, affection, sex, trauma, sadomasochism, and healing, where it's not always clear if these things are happening in the right order, or to the right person.</p><p>"I should get myself a live-in one. It must be so funny." - James Moriarty, The Reichenbach Fall</p><p>AU: Several years before the events of The Reichenbach Fall, James Moriarty decided that he wanted a pet. His idea of how to acquire and what to do with one, however, would give most people a lifetime of nightmares.</p><p>Mycroft Holmes thinks that Moriarty's pet might be a useful source of information about the criminal, so he liberates her. Finding a novel puzzle to solve, he decides to put her back together himself. Mycroft, however, has gone a long time without letting anyone close to him, and he finds himself in over his head in ways that he never expected.</p><p>The Daddy/underaged girl dynamic is not fucking around in this fic, exploitation runs rampant, and there is explicit sadomasochism. As an astute reader recently pointed out, this is basically a fucked up, kinky version of Pygmalion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Trauma

**Author's Note:**

> Obviously the author is working out some lifelong issues around sex and trauma. Let's hope it makes for a good story and some hot porn, shall we?

“Moriarty made it out.” Andrea delivered the bad news, too professional to let any hint of her frustration into her voice.

“Damnation.” Mycroft had spent too long planning this particular raid to be thwarted. He tapped his umbrella against the pavement, a sure sign of his ire.

His assistant tapped at her Blackberry, which was probably the more helpful intervention. “The premises will be secure within five minutes, sir.”

There was a light drizzle tonight but Mycroft was so engrossed in the mission that he hadn’t even bothered to employ his brolly. He’d genuinely believed that they had the insane little Irishman backed into a corner, and he was furious to learn that there’d been an escape route that he'd missed. He was impatient to get inside and begin the post-mortem.

“Ah,” Andrea said to her device in satisfaction, and Mycroft raised a brow.

“We forced him to abandon the girl. She's secured now.”

 _Finally_. At least something tonight had gone their way. Mycroft allowed the corner of his mouth to lift slightly.

“I want to see her.”

“Yes, sir.”

Andrea led him into Moriarty’s bolthole. The dingy little flat was clearly a place for the maniac to come to indulge in poor judgment regarding substance use, sexual activity, and weapons, often all at the same time. He sometimes took the girl with him when he traveled, but this flat was where he kept her confined most often, and where he usually came when he wanted to play with her for an extended period.

Mycroft had hoped to corner him while he was a multi-day bender, judgment impaired. That was why he'd chosen this particular bolthole. Barring that, however, he had hoped to get his hands on the human being who had had the most frequent intimate access to James Moriarty for the past three years.

The bedroom stank, though Mycroft resisted the urge to pull out his pocket square and cover his mouth. The forensic team were already starting their work, and the agent whom Mycroft had appointed as the girl’s first point of contact was standing in the doorway of the large closet where Moriarty locked the girl up. The agent’s weapon was holstered, her hands raised appeasingly, and she was speaking in a soft, calm voice.

“Agent Cormer,” Mycroft said, and she moved out of his way.

An emaciated girl huddled in the furthest corner of the closet, her knees drawn up to her chest, her face turned away behind a curtain of dirty hair. She was trembling violently, her lips moving silently as she repeated a phrase to herself, her eyes screwed shut.

Mycroft felt a strange set of reactions rise within him as he studied her for the first time. By his best estimate she was probably no more than fourteen, and had been in Moriarty’s possession for at least three years. Mycroft had been aware of her existence for a year, and frankly was surprised and relieved that she’d survived this long. He found himself simultaneously intrigued and appalled to inventory all of the damage that the sadist had done to her young body.

“Hello, dear,” Mycroft said mildly, advancing slowly into the closet and squatting down, close enough for her to feel his presence but far enough that he wasn’t looming over her. “My name is Mycroft. We came here to find you, so that we could put an end to your ordeal. You’re safe now, and no one is going to hurt you any more. Do you understand me?”

No reaction. Mycroft leaned in a bit to get a read on what she was muttering to herself.

_It’s another trick. It’s another trick. It’s another trick._

Ah.

Mycroft lowered his voice even further, manufacturing warmth. “He’s made you think that it was over before, hasn't he? Probably more than once, even?”

Her eyes opened and she shot him a look of alarm.

“I understand,” Mycroft said. “Now I’m going to tell you what’s going to happen next. Please stop that and pay attention, dear.”

As he'd suspected, the direct order worked; he was pretty sure that she would obey whenever she could. She halted in reciting her frantic mantra to herself, her eyes flicking toward him from behind her filthy locks.

“I see that there’s not going to be any point to trying to convince you that you’re truly safe, as you’re going to have to learn it for yourself. To that end, I’m going to take you somewhere else now, and we’re going to clean you up and give you appropriate medical attention and feed you. I’m going to continue to keep you safe. And at some point, you will have remained safe and under my care for longer than he ever played this trick on you. And when we pass that milestone, you are going to mark it with a small act of hope, and tell me your name.”

She didn’t give any response, but she didn’t resume her recitation when he was done, simply sat there shaking and staring at him with wide, green eyes.

“I’m going to take that collar off of you now,” Mycroft said.

She went rigid, and Mycroft held up one hand behind him, snapping. In response Andrea pressed a small key into his palm. He had to lift the girl’s snarled hair away from her thin neck to expose the lock, and he was relieved when it gave way easily to the key.

The collar was heavy leather, hard-used and utilitarian, and oversized for the girl’s small frame. Its weight had left callouses on the points of her collarbones, with plenty of fresh bruises atop them. Her neck and the side of her face had been mottled by hands the exact size of Moriarty's, and her nude body was covered in the marks of his fingers and his teeth. She bore fresh welts and cuts as well, and she’d obviously been undernourished for years.

Mycroft reached back again and Andrea pressed a clean blanket into his hands, one larger and softer than the shock blankets that the medics provided. Sometimes he was still tempted to ask how her she performed that particular trick, but there were so few mysteries left in the world that he had decided some time ago to let it be.

He wrapped the blanket around the girl, and she shrank back at his touch but made no move to fight him. He tried to pull her to her feet, but she resisted strangely and he remembered that she wasn’t allowed off of her knees. Of course she wasn’t. It had been a long time since she’d been permitted to walk somewhere.

Mycroft considered his options. Then he squatted down again, slid his arms beneath her, and lifted her up off of the floor of the closet.

With a couple more years’ growth on her, and unstarved, she would have been a bit much of an armful, but as it was he felt confident that he could carry her to the car without making a spectacle of himself. For a moment her arms started to snake around his neck, then she pulled back with a stifled sob. Mycroft frowned, cradling her face against the expensive wool covering his shoulder as he carried her out past the forensic and security teams. He ignored their curious looks as Mycroft Holmes strode by with a battered girl in his arms.

It had been decades since Mycroft carried anyone like this, and many years since he’d felt another human’s skin against his for any reason. He noticed his own heartbeat picking up as he leaned over to tuck her into the back seat, but it was certainly only due to the effort of the task. 

She clutched the blanket and scrambled onto the floor, tears streaming down her face as she gasped. He decided that it would do, and slid into the car beside her. She pushed back away from him, rocking slightly as she cringed in the furthest corner of the footwell, but he simply settled in and began texting his underlings, giving her time to collect herself.

When they arrived in the garage beneath Mycroft's building, he gathered her back up as he had before, knowing that he would have time to figure out how to get her walking again later.

_Besides, you want another excuse to carry the broken little thing._

That wasn’t true. Mycroft ignored it, focusing on the practical aspects.

He carried her into the lift that took them directly to his Pall Mall flat. Once again she was passive and unresisting as he folded her into his chest protectively, but he could feel the fear wracking her little body. Once inside, he took her to the kitchen and tried to perch her on a chair at the breakfast bar.

No, she was panicking again, writhing in his arms and sobbing quietly. Mycroft relented, letting her slide gently down onto the tiles instead. She collapsed into a heap, curling in on herself. It wasn’t quite what he had intended, but he was quickly learning that Moriarty’s conditioning of the girl had been so brutal and extensive that it was going to take significant work to break through it.

Mycroft squatted before her and put his hand on her shoulder. She jerked beneath his touch, then froze.

“I won’t try to make you walk any more, or sit on the furniture. All right? I promise, dear.”

The frightened tears began to slow at these words. Mycroft gave her a smile, relieved to be on the right track.

“Now I’m going to make you some toast and tea, and you can have them down here on the floor. You see?”

He set about making good on this, letting the girl wind down into a less agitated state. In short order he was leaning down to put a plate and cup on the floor near her, painfully aware that attempting to serve her at the table would simply elicit another panic attack.

“Eat, child. You’re going to need to keep that down for an hour before you can have any more. We have to be careful about starting you on regular food again.”

He stood and backed up so as not to loom over her, then crossed his arms and leaned back on the counter to watch her eat. She slowly uncurled and, with frightened glances at Mycroft, moved toward the food on her hands and knees. She lowered her face to the plate to nibble at the toast without using her fingers, and drank the tea surprisingly neatly, tipping the mug with her mouth as she went to avoid spilling any.

_Of course. She has had years of practice._

Once again Mycroft found himself contemplating the extremes to which Moriarty had taken his abuse of the girl. There was a part of Mycroft, a carefully cultivated part that carefully calculated at all times how he was supposed to appear to feel about events occurring around him, and that part of him understood that sympathy was the correct response to her. In some vague intellectual sense, he supposed that he did feel pity for her. After a year he’d not yet been able to identify where Moriarty had found her, and for all he knew she’d spent her entire life in some form of captivity.

But Moriarty had reduced her. Stripped her of her humanity and hope, when she'd still been so young that neither had ever fully had the chance to take root. He'd abused and traumatized her however his whim dictated, and played with her mind and body whenever he was bored. The truth was, Mycroft found it more fascinating than repugnant.

Had he lived in a world where he was both inclined and free to explore his own darkest fantasies of sexual subjugation, the idea of choosing such a vulnerable victim held no appeal for him. He was far more enticed by the idea of breaking the strong than the weak, as what challenge did the latter hold? But now that he had Moriarty’s pet in front of him, he was realizing that the question of whether he could _reconstruct_ her -- take the defenseless child that Moriarty believed he had fractured into pieces, and make her into a functional human being again -- was gripping.

She ate quickly and methodically, periodically glancing over at him to check his expression. She was watching for any oncoming storms, obviously.

“My brother Sherlock and his friend John will be here in a moment,” Mycroft told her as she finished the toast and tea. “John is a doctor, and he will examine you and tell me what sort of treatment you need in the immediate future. In the meantime, let's get you cleaned up. Follow me, dear.”

He led the way back the hall to his own bathroom suite, and she followed on her hands and knees, head down and focused on staying at his heels at all costs. Her palms and knees had thick callouses, and she was clearly indifferent to the minor discomforts of crawling on tile or carpet.

In the bathroom, Mycroft leaned down and gently unwrapped the blanket from her shoulders. She shuddered, her muscles rigid and trembling.

“Into the bath, please,” Mycroft instructed, helping her in and then opening the tap. She pulled up into the back of the tub and he wondered if she’d ever had a bath before. From the way her eyes were fixed on the water as it swirled around her toes and then calves and thighs, he thought not.

He heard Sherlock let himself and John into the flat and he left his new charge in the filling bathtub in order to give them an update on the situation. John had brought his medical kit, and quickly started writing a list of equipment and drugs for Andrea to procure and bring to the flat.

It was clear that John was assuming that he would take over cleaning her up as part of his duties as her doctor, but Mycroft found himself feeling strangely territorial about the job, and wound up rolling up his own sleeves and giving the girl a careful, thorough bath with his own hands. He shampooed her hair once, then let all the water out, rinsed her off in the shower, and then ran her a second bath and washed her again in the clean water. At the end her skin was actually pink from warmth in the few places that had escaped Moriarty’s most recent abuses, and it turned out that under the filth her previously-matted hair was actually curly and distinctly auburn.

Once she was clean he sat on the top of the commode, situated her on the tile floor between his knees, and carefully worked a comb with some conditioner through her hair from roots to ends. Then he brought her to the sink and washed her face and brushed her teeth for her with a new toothbrush. Her gums bled, and he made a note to get a dentist to the flat quickly as well.

Tears ran silently down her face the entire time that he was taking care of her. Mycroft made no comment on this.

Once she was clean to his satisfaction, he dressed her in one of his undershirts and a pair of Sherlock’s silk boxers. Mycroft looked down at her and gave her a final once-over. She would have been pretty, might still be again once she was healthier and had another stone or two on her. Mycroft imagined what she must have looked like three years ago, and discovered that he was capable of new levels of revulsion with James Moriarty.

“Come,” he said, and she dropped to her knees and crawled after him into the bedroom, where John and his newly-delivered equipment waited.

The army doctor smiled disarmingly at her without reacting visibly to the sight of the battered, cringing girl crawling on the floor. “My name is John, and I'm the doctor who is going to help Mycroft take care of you and get you healthy again,” John said mildly. “Please come on up on the bed where I can see you and you can be comfortable.”

Mycroft knew that the bed was going to be the one piece of furniture that the girl wasn’t punished for touching. Sure enough she crawled up at John’s request, flinching from John’s helping hand at her elbow as she had from Mycroft’s.

John explained to her that he was going to start with a general examination of her health, describing each step as if she’d never been in a doctor’s office before. He listened to her lungs and heart and checked her throat and ears with his otoscope. He was warm and professional, and Mycroft reflected once again how handy it was to have someone normal in his inner circle now. Especially a 'normal' with as many valuable skills as John Watson, who could both heal people and kill people, who was unfailingly loyal to a Holmes, and who was not on any government payroll.

“The good news is, you’re in surprisingly good health, given what you’ve been through,” John was telling the girl as he listened to her back again, clearly disliking something that he was hearing. “I’m giving you a course of strong antibiotics, some painkillers for the first few days, and some sleep medication so that the nightmares don’t disrupt your body and mind's ability to start healing.”

He stood back and looked regretful. “There’s one part of the exam that is still important. I need to see how much damage has been done to your genitals. Can you lie back and spread your legs for me? I will be very gentle.”

She blanched again, shaking. It was clear that she expected something horrible to happen to her, and Mycroft saw John’s jaw tighten in anger.

“It’s going to be somewhat uncomfortable, but I’m not going to hurt you. For now, I’m just going to take a look.”

True to his word, John leaned down with his light and took an initial, careful look around with his fingers without even attempting a speculum. He probed at her lightly, but after a moment he straightened. His eyes were full of pity as he ran the fingers of his left hand through his hair, then swore and stripped both of his gloves off. Mycroft knew it was a sign of how deeply he was disturbed that a combat surgeon as seasoned as John Watson had just contaminated himself mid-exam.

He looked over at Mycroft. “He’s made a right mess of her, Mycroft.”

She didn’t react to this, just stared up at John apprehensively, waiting to see if he was going to touch her any more.

“Go ahead,” Mycroft said. “She’s going to have to hear it all eventually. It might as well be now.”

John closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose, then nodded in agreement.

“I can’t get a good look without a speculum, but while there’s definitely substantial damage to her cervix, I believe that it's neither recent nor infected. A significant portion of her clitoris and labia have been cut or burned away over time, and she’s going to require extensive reconstructive surgery once she’s fully healed. I’m not sure whether she still retains the capacity for a normal sexual response or not; there's actually a good deal more clitoral tissue than most people realize aside from the exposed portion of the structure, so it's possible. I definitely won't be able to guess if she'll be able to bear children until I get a real look at her cervix.”

Mycroft sighed. “Do you think that any more extensive examination can wait until after some more food and rest? Perhaps tomorrow?”

“Yeah, sure. There’s nothing more that I can do for her tonight. She needs several months of safety, food and sleep more than any medical treatment, you know. I should dress a couple of the worst welts, and three of the lacerations need a couple of staples.”

Mycroft was relieved by John’s opinion, and also relieved when John was able to bundle Sherlock out of the flat in fairly short order once the medical care had been covered. Left to her own devices after John finished her wound-care, the girl had turned onto her side and curled up on Mycroft’s bed, hiding her face.

Mycroft crossed his arms, studying her. After a couple of minutes of him standing still in the room watching her, she peeked out at him apprehensively.

“Moriarty kept you in his bed when he was with you, and you slept on the floor in the closet when he was away,” Mycroft said thoughtfully.

Her eyes widened, and suddenly she was moving, sliding off the bed and scrambling to her knees at its foot, where she knelt with her shaking hands intertwined behind her neck and her gaze lowered to the carpet. Clearly this was part of her training.

Mycroft opened his mouth, wondering what exactly he meant to tell her to do. Instead he sighed and decided to leave her where she was for a few minutes. He slipped into the bathroom and went through his own evening toilet, contemplating how to handle what was ahead.

Once he was clad in his pyjamas, he went back to the kitchen to make more toast and tea. The girl still knelt where he'd left her. He shook his head and brought the food into the bedroom, placing the plate on the floor near where she waited.

She eyed him hopefully, and Mycroft gave her a smile and indicated the food. Once again, she laid on the floor and ate directly from the plate. Mycroft sat on the edge of the bed watching her, but about halfway through he awkwardly realized that the scene was evoking a reaction in his body, one which he had rather strong feelings about not wanting the girl to witness.

Mycroft frowned at himself. He knew his goals for the girl, and didn’t mind that unpuzzling her was going to provide a novel distraction for a few days, possibly even weeks. But his body was starting to have its own agenda, of which Mycroft did not approve at all. With concentration he was able to will away the unwelcome blood flow. He waited patiently for her to finish, then gestured for her to come to him. She crawled to him, eyes averted.

Mycroft knew damned well that the girl would acquiesce silently to absolutely anything that he decided to do with her, but that wasn’t why she was here. He steeled his resolve -- and what the hell was wrong with him, because that _shouldn’t_ have been necessary. He stood up and turned back the blankets on his bed. Then he tugged the girl up and tucked her in between his sheets, and slipped in beside her.

She froze. Mycroft pulled her in against his side the same way that Moriarty always did on the few tapes where Mycroft had caught him with her in his travels.  She whimpered, her small hands tentatively moving toward his groin. Mycroft grasped her wrist gently to impede her.

“No, dear. You are free to sleep here in bed with me, or in the closet by yourself where you will find a comfortable pillow and bedding of your own. Your instruction is to sleep wherever you find yourself feeling safer. Do you understand? You are not here to service me. You are here to sleep, as long as you want.”

His words made her nervous, but she shifted against him shyly, the first time that she’d done anything other than lay passive in his arms or against him. Mycroft closed his eyes, breathing in the scent of her now-clean hair, and admitted to himself that after all these years of sleeping alone, he actually wasn’t going to mind this particular aspect of his duties in the near future.

After half an hour she wasn’t asleep, and Mycroft reached out to find the glass of water and sleeping tablet that he’d left handy on the bedside table. He popped the medication into her mouth without any resistance, then held the glass to her lips and told her to drink.

She looked frightened, and he realized that she didn’t want to sleep. He wondered what some of Moriarty’s favorite ways to torture her awake had been.

“You need sleep, dear. I’ll be here when the nightmares start.”


	2. Acute Stress Reaction

She didn’t have any nightmares the first night.

Mycroft allowed himself a few catnaps, in between periods of monitoring the girl in his arms and making plans for how to break through her trauma in the most efficient fashion given what he’d learned so far. She wasn’t going to talk, or to break Moriarty’s rules, not until she allowed herself the painful hope that this wasn’t yet another trick. And because he didn’t know how long Moriarty had drug out his previous traps for the girl, he couldn’t estimate whether that would take days or weeks.

But he needed information. That was what this entire mission had been about, if they didn’t manage to nab Moriarty himself.

At the hour that he usually arose, she was sleeping restlessly but still in his bed, tucked up against his side. Mycroft stayed in bed with her, continuing to press kisses on her warm forehead and murmur reassurances that she was safe whenever she made frightened sounds. The more hours he spent rewiring her central nervous system, the faster she would feel safe enough to talk, and he was able to get a fair amount done as long as he had one free hand and a brilliant PA who was always accessible by text message.

When the girl finally opened her eyes she drew back from him, wincing as she waited to see if she was going to be punished. Mycroft reached out and ran his fingers into her hair instead, and she froze in place, her green eyes wide. He scratched his nails gently against her scalp, experimentally, as if he were petting a dog. Her lips parted, her eyes fixed on him, and the tip of her tongue made a brief appearance. Her eyes grew wet, but for the first time it wasn’t due to fear.

“Good girl,” Mycroft murmured. Her eyelids lowered as she leaned into his touch.

Curious, he gently twined his fingers into the thickest part of her hair at the base of her skull, and gave a light tug.

She moaned abruptly, her eyelids fluttering. 

It was a real reaction. Not faked. Not trained. Her eyes flew open again in horror at her response, and she tensed, waiting to see what he would do next. He went back to running his fingers through her curls, petting, soothing. Slowly her body relaxed again. It was the first time he’d seen her look at peace for even a moment.

“I see. You like that very much, don’t you, dear? That’s very helpful, thank you,” Mycroft said.

After a while he rose to his feet and snapped his fingers for her to follow. Her eyes flew open, and within a second she was sliding out of the bed and onto her knees on the floor. At least she was wearing clothes and she was clean. She scrambled to follow him down to the kitchen.

Mycroft yawned as he poured two cups of coffee and placed one on the floor. She looked at him warily, but approached it and lapped it slowly from the cup, watching him all the while.

He started her with another piece of toast, but this morning he went on to fry eggs, potatoes and ham, though he used a light touch with the butter and oil. She ate a moderate portion on the floor next to his chair while he perused the news.

She finished before him, and Mycroft became aware that she was watching him intently. Without looking up from the paper he again snapped his finger beside his thigh, and was gratified when she sat up instantly. He pulled her against him, pressing her body against the length of his leg, and she cooperated easily enough this time. She drew in a long, shuddering breath, which he thought was perhaps as much hope as fear this time. He put his large hand over her hair and pressed the bruised side of her face gently against his thigh. She stayed rigid for a moment, but when Mycroft slid his fingers into her hair again, she relaxed. He smiled without looking down.

He worked from home throughout the day, having Andrea come by for several hours during the afternoon. He kept the girl near him, but didn’t pay much direct attention to her. He simply soothed her when she panicked, pulled her close when her breathing tightened, and ran his fingers through her hair any time they weren’t occupied with something more important. Other than that, he didn’t try to make her walk, or eat off a table, or talk, or act like a human being instead of a pet.

It wasn’t until the second day that she started to break down. Mid-morning she suddenly collapsed into a long fit of weeping so intense that she had a difficult time breathing, which clearly terrified her, creating a vicious feedback loop. The crying continued at unpredictable intervals throughout the day. Each time Mycroft reigned her in gently and firmly, pulling her into his lap, holding her, petting her and telling her that she was safe until it was over.

When moving around the flat he didn’t shy from giving her direct orders when he wanted her to do something, but he left her to her own devices where he could. There were plenty of books around, but so far she showed no interest in anything except eating and not being tortured.

John had returned to look at her and pronounced that the best thing for her was to leave her body to the antibiotics and its own healing process. Mycroft cooked for the two of them every few hours, and he served her a slightier heartier portion of food on the floor at every meal.

As she sensed a second bedtime approaching, she seemed to become anxious, and Mycroft wondered what it was that she feared was going to happen if she didn’t keep him happy. He stayed the course he set for himself, treating her as a pet while she waited to discover if this was yet another trick to destroy her mind. He decided to pull her into his bed again, still believing that she needed soothing touch more than she needed space, but he reminded her that she was to retreat to the closet alone at any point if she felt safer there.

Even after John’s medication, it was still a couple of hours before her exhausted mind and body succumbed. She was deeply asleep for almost four hours before the nightmares started, at which point Mycroft began a detailed inventory of everything that followed as he applied himself to rewiring her central nervous system.  

He soothed her through seven cycles of sleep and nightmares before she fully awakened again. She started nearly upright, sweating and stuttering. “No, _no_ , no, no, _no_ ,” she rasped brokenly, the first words he’d heard in her cracked, disused voice.

His left arm was wrapped around her, and he squeezed her gently, pulling her back in toward his side.

“It’s over now, remember,” Mycroft murmured against her hair, in counterpoint to her new mantra. “You’ll see. No one will hurt you anymore. It’s over, and you’re safe.”

Once she calmed down, he pulled her out of bed put them through their morning ablutions together.

With practice, it became easier for her to comply where his preferences ran counter to Moriarty’s. She was able to brace herself upright before the bathroom sink and let him take care of her hair and teeth and face to his satisfaction, though she shook with fear the entire time. He had another pillow and blanket brought into his home office, and she alternately napped and watched him from her vantage on the floor.

On the third day she crawled under his desk and napped at his feet, with her chin on his foot. Mycroft was able to manage three international crises, a hostage situation and an irritated John Watson without ever interrupting her sleep. That was also the day that a dentist appeared and examined her mouth, and that Andrea sent a woman who trimmed the girl’s hair and nails.

By the fourth day, they’d fallen into a surprisingly comfortable rhythm. Eventually there were meetings that he had to attend, hours that absolutely had to be spent at Whitehall or the Diogenes Club. He minimized them as much as he could. Sometimes he left her with Andrea and sometimes with John Watson. The former handled the situation impeccably, and even the latter had to grudgingly admit that Mycroft’s tactics seemed to be easing the girl through the worst of her post-traumatic response.

Mycroft knew that his approach seemed out-of-bounds to the straight-laced John Watson, but on the other hand he was counting on the fact that John knew exactly what the girl would be experiencing as she tried to assimilate the idea that her ordeal might actually be over. John had experienced the nightmares that came of extended trauma, and Sherlock had provided his cure. Mycroft knew that John could not begrudge such a cure for those nightmares to anyone else.

John understood that the girl was still following the rules that Moriarty had tortured into her, and he didn’t try to push her on it, though it obviously discomforted him to witness her crawling or cringing. But he continued to proclaim her healthy and gaining weight steadily, and so he did no more than give Mycroft a skeptical frown.

At night the girl slept against Mycroft’s side. Most nights she made some attempt to please him sexually that he firmly rebuffed. Every night as the nightmares started he wrapped her in warmth and pressed his mouth against her hair and told her over and over that she was safe and that no one was going to hurt her.

On the fifth morning she woke in a hard sweat again, gasping for air. She calmed herself as quickly as she could through considerable effort, and he knew that she was trying not to wake him, unaware that he already was. She slowly, carefully extricated herself from under his arm and slipped from the bed as silently as she could.

He cracked a lid, and watched her pad from the room on two feet, shooting a fearful glance over her shoulder at him. So she could do it, as long as she believed that no one was watching. He’d suspected as much.

After a couple of moments to let her get up to whatever she intended, Mycroft rose and followed her from the bedroom. She stood braced against the kitchen counter, her arms shaking as she stared defiantly at the kettle. She winced visibly when he came in the room, and he saw her knees nearly buckle with the force of her impulse to drop to the floor, but she resisted it and simply hunched her shoulders instead.

Mycroft came over to stand beside her. He reached one hand up into her thick curls and began to scratch her scalp approvingly. “Well done, dear,” he told her softly.

She collapsed against his side, and Mycroft put his arm around her.

“He’s _never_ coming for you,” Mycroft told her for the thousandth time. “He cannot get to you here. He will never be able to get to you here. _No one_ will ever be able to get to you here. _I will keep you safe now_.”

She began to cry, softly at first, then harder, clutching at Mycroft’s pyjamas. He frowned, switched off the kettle, and lifted the girl into his arms and carried her around the corner to the settee in the front room. There he cradled her against his chest and repeated his statements to her over and over while she cried herself out.

In the end his pyjamas were sodden with her tears, but he thought that they might have gotten somewhere. The girl was pliant and relaxed, her eyelids heavy as Mycroft cradled her in his lap.

He thought that she might finally talk, so he decided to exercise patience. The truth was, he was going to have to admit to himself that he found the time that he spent petting and reprogramming her to be surprisingly soothing for him as well. Perhaps he'd been in need of a vacation, and had allowed this particular project to provide an excuse.

When she spoke, her voice was small, raspy with tears and disuse. “How long am I allowed to stay here?”

Mycroft felt a strange squeezing sensation in his chest. “Until you decide that you want to leave,” he said.

It was a considerable commitment, but Mycroft felt at peace with it. The reassurance would definitely de-escalate her trauma response, especially now that he was conditioning her to (correctly) think of his flat as the safest location from Moriarty. Mycroft didn’t intend to take advantage of her, no matter how much his brain had begun to spin idle scenarios of a warm body under his arm every night, growing taller and healthier and perhaps even happier under his care and protection.

Mycroft hadn’t been prepared for this assignment to cause all of his fatherhood issues to re-emerge, but looking at the child he supposed that it should have been predictable enough. He found himself wishing that Moriarty hadn’t chosen his toy quite so... young, although, if he were honest, he understood why he had.

Her breathing was steady and even for a while, and Mycroft nuzzled his nose into her hair, encouraging further sharing without startling her with words.

“What if I never want to leave?” she finally asked.

“Then you shall stay here,” Mycroft answered. “Sleeping in my bed or in your own, eating healthy food, and passing your days in my company, if that’s what you want. After a little while we’ll start strengthening your body, and begin your education.”

There was another long pause.

“But... you don’t want to play with me?” Her voice was flat, puzzled, and it was clear how nervous she was about asking this particular question.

Well, that answered that. She had no idea what normal relationships between middle-aged men and teenaged girls were supposed to look like, so she had no pre-Moriarty reference point. Mycroft now felt sure that she’d spent her childhood before Moriarty in some sort of captivity as well.

He closed his eyes and considered how best to lie to her. “No, dear, I don’t want to play with you. Not the way that Moriarty played with you. Only evil men hurt children for their own amusement, and I'm not an evil man.”

She was silent, digesting this. He had the strong sense that his words troubled her in some way, but he wasn't sure how. He was starting to realize there there was a factor missing from his calculations about how to handle her.

“Did you have a name before Moriarty?” he asked, hoping to distract her from whatever was disturbing her, to give him more time to figure it out.

He had enough audio of their interactions over the past year to know that Moriarty had never referred to her as anything other than 'pet.'

He could hear her chewing on her bottom lip. “The lady who sold me to Daddy called me Willow,” she said softly.

Mycroft felt a surprising surge of anger rise up in his chest when the girl referred to her captor by the foolish title that he so often gave himself. He hid it carefully, not wanting her to think it was directed at her.

“Willow is a nice name," he said. "Do you like it, or shall I come up with something new for you?”

She was silent, and Mycroft realized that she was flummoxed by being asked for her opinion. “Do you like it?” she asked in a small voice.

“Certainly; it suits you. And you need a name, as you are not a pet anymore. Soon you’re going to learn to be a girl again.”

This statement made her nervous, and he heard her swallow.

“Am I still allowed to stay here if I’m a girl?”

 _Quite the contrary, you’re going to stay here until I’ve made you into the woman that I decide you were supposed to be,_ he almost said, and definitely didn’t.

“You asked me just a moment ago how long you get to stay here, Willow. What was my answer then?”

She cringed in his arms at the gentle rebuke. “Until I decide I want to leave,” she whispered raggedly.

“That will always be the answer, dear. Every time, and it will never change. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Now tell me, where did your daddy find you?” Referring to Moriarty that way left a sour taste in his mouth, but right now he needed answers from her more than he needed to retrain her habits of thought.

“I -- I lived and worked in a house when I was little, with other girls without families. We cleaned and sewed, because we weren’t for men back then. I was one of the ones they wanted to save.”

By 'save,' she meant that she’d been sold to James Moriarty a virgin, of course… only the best for him. Mycroft winced, marveling at the fact that the criminal had gone to great lengths to procure the perfect victim to terrorize into his personal sexual object. Every detail had been calculated to maximize her suffering. She’d been a girl who had never known freedom, so that she would have no resistance in her. But he would have paid a pretty penny to buy her untouched, so that he could shape her experience of sex and abuse exactly the way he wanted from the very start.

Mycroft shifted the girl in his lap. He’d been holding her cradled so that she didn't have to look him in the face as she talked, knowing it would make it easier for her to get the first words out to mumble into his chest. Now he still kept her close, but pulled away just enough so that he could see her. She winced, closing her eyes and turning away, frightened by being seen now that she'd broken Moriarty's rule against speech.

“No, Willow. Look at me. What I’m about to tell you is important.”

She reluctantly opened her eyes and looked up at him. He carded his fingers into her hair in the manner that she found so soothing.

“Willow, it’s not only Moriarty that you’re free of now. He’s not your daddy anymore, but _no one_ is going to touch you ever again, not unless you want them to.”

Her eyes widened.

“ _You_ touch me.” It didn’t sound like a complaint. She sounded _worried_ about it, in a way that was difficult to interpret.

He stroked her hair. “Yes, I know. I like petting you very much, and you also enjoy it, and it’s helping you, isn't it? But I’m not going to hurt you, Willow, and I’m not going to use you for sexual purposes. No one is. That’s not what you’re _for_ anymore.”

She stared at him, confused, and he realized that his words were worsening her agitation as she began to tremble in his lap. In fact, she was becoming frightened, starting to panic again. Tears now.

“Daddy broke me,” she whispered in fear, looking away from him. “No one wants me.”

Dammit.

“No, Willow, that's not what I'm saying. You’re not broken; you’re _safe_. I’m taking care of you, and I've already told you that I intend to continue to do so. No one is going to hurt you anymore because _I won’t allow it_.”

A hitched cry escaped her, which she tried and failed to swallow. Tears were flowing freely, but her muscles tensed up as she fought against them, and her shaking fingers were twisted into the front of his pyjamas again. Mycroft cradled her, still trying to uncover the missing factor in his analysis of her interpretation of her change in circumstances. She cried silently for almost twenty minutes before petering out again. Mycroft rocked her and pressed his lips to her hair and stroked her arms and back and told her over and over that she was safe and he was going to take care of her. He was going to have to figure out what part of her conditioning he’d missed before he tried again. Finally he gave her a long, slow squeeze.

“Time for breakfast,” he told her gently, then placed her carefully on her feet before him and stood up.

Her eyes were wide, but she didn’t panic. She took a deep breath, staring at him, and Mycroft gave her an encouraging smile and put his arm around her shoulders. "It's time to start walking again, dear."

She walked. Her steps were wobbly, but she did it.

“Good girl, that’s my girl,” he said, leading her back to the kitchen. Mycroft could see that she must have continued to spend time on her feet when Moriarty had left her to her own devices, as she didn’t have the atrophy that she would have had she truly stopped walking altogether for several years.

Mycroft tried to encourage her onto the tall chair at the breakfast bar, and she locked up before shooting him a terrified glance and gingerly perching herself on the edge of the chair, biting her lip.

Mycroft stood back a bit and regarded her. She waited nervously.

“This won’t do. We’ll leave it at walking for this morning, shall we?”

With a look of incredible relief she slid bonelessly from the chair toward the floor, where she collapsed into a little heap of bruised skin and white cotton.

Shaking his head, Mycroft went about making a full English breakfast for both of them. She maneuvered around the bar so that she could watch him working from her place on the floor, but in the aftermath of her breakthrough she seemed to be drawing in on herself. Mycroft wasn’t too worried, as he’d expected her physical and emotional recovery to be an uneven road. He spent the time seasoning and frying going over their short conversation, considering new ways to try to explain why she wasn’t going to be raped anymore to a child with her warped frame of reference for the world.

He let her eat on the floor, earmarking that for their next milestone.

Each day so far she’d visibly been getting stronger, and now Mycroft was just starting to be able to see that her cheeks were slightly less hollow, her ribs a fraction less prominent. Her colour was starting to improve as well. But today, after her morning breakdown, she seemed more exhausted rather than less. Mycroft had Andrea come to the flat and, after updating his assistant, left the girl with her for several hours so that he could accomplish some critical items that required his presence at Whitehall and the Diogenes Club.

On his way to the office, dull irritation running through his veins, he allowed himself to acknowledge how much more interesting he found the puzzle that he had waiting at home over any of the usual sort that his work afforded. He found his fingers inclined to twitch, looking for curls to work themselves through. His palm ached to feel the slight tilt of her skull into his hand that told him how much she liked his neat nails moving gently across her scalp. The girl was small and warm, and Mycroft found himself missing her physical presence in a way that he’d not felt since Sherlock had been a little boy, before he'd stopped being affectionate.

Mycroft frowned throughout his afternoon as he contemplated how unpleasant he found it to be away from his charge. He was supposed to be cultivating an important source of information about James Moriarty, not contending with his own needs.

“She’s getting stronger quickly,” Andrea observed later, back at the flat, as she gathered up her things to leave.

“Her body, yes,” Mycroft agreed, shuffling the files and books that he’d brought home from the Diogenes into their locations in his home office. “But Moriarty had her a long time, and he broke her badly. I’m starting to doubt that she’s ever going to be able to lead a normal life.”

Andrea looked sad at his words. “No? She’s so young. It’s going to take a lot of time, but she still might adjust.”

“Perhaps.”

Mycroft retrieved the girl from his office and took her to his bedroom, where she now had a drawer of her own that Andrea had been stocking with plain, comfortable clothing for convalescence, mostly scrubs made from luxuriously soft cottons and loose athletic items. He pulled out a breezy blouse and a long skirt and laid them on the bed, then pointed at the en suite.

“Shower, brush your hair and teeth, get dressed, and come for dinner, please,” he instructed.

She swallowed and nodded. It was the first time he’d expected her to get through cleaning herself on her own, but she had turned out to be a fast learner and he believed that she could handle it at her current strength.

She appeared half an hour later, freshly scrubbed to his satisfaction. With her hair clean and trimmed, she was starting to look like a normal girl… she still probably looked younger than her age due to the malnutrition, but that was improving too. The worst of her bruises had deepened to ugly greens now, and the milder scrapes and bruises were beginning to heal. She was wearing a lacy headband that kept her hair out of her eyes, and Mycroft was pleased to see how pretty her face was now that it wasn’t obscured behind filthy locks.

_Why should that matter, Mycroft? She’s a child._

Mycroft stood beside the chair at the foot of the table. He’d made linguine with clams in a light alfredo sauce, steamed and buttered squash, and a large plate heaped with steaming garlic bread. Beside each of their dinners stood a chilled glass of chardonnay, hers only half full. She froze, eyes wide, taking in the tableau.

Mycroft pulled out her chair. She came forward tentatively, still obviously nervous to be walking and even more nervous at the prospect of sitting in the chair.

“No one is going to hurt you anymore, Willow,” Mycroft said firmly, inclining his head toward her chair.

Gingerly she sat, and Mycroft pushed her chair in. She stiffened, unsure of what to expect, and then relaxed again when he simply situated her. He picked up the glass of wine, pressing it into her hand.

“Drink this. Slowly. It will help you with the meal.”

She hesitated before picking up her fork, and the utensils were clumsy in her hands. Mycroft calculated that she’d probably eaten with them as a child, but had probably not held any during her years with Moriarty. She ate slowly and methodically. Concentrating on using the tableware seemed to give her something to take her mind off of the fear of sitting at a table, so Mycroft was silent and let her apply herself.

After dinner, Mycroft cleared the table and took Willow to his office, where instead of situating himself at his desk, he sat on the settee under the window and patted the cushion beside him. He’d already set out the files and documents he needed for his evening reading, as well as a bottle and tumbler. She looked nervous about joining him on the couch, but when he maneuvered her so that her head lay in his lap, she relaxed. He began to pet her and she sighed, nuzzling her cheek against his thigh as his fingernails raked gently through her hair and across her sensitive scalp.

She dozed off quickly, but he continued his ministrations, working on her central nervous system even while she wasn't awake to appreciate it.

He worked on both tasks until shortly before ten, when he set aside his file and gave her a tap on the shoulder, which she correctly interpreted to mean that he was standing.

Mycroft led the girl to his bedroom, where he realized with bemusement that he was _disappointed_ to have lost the excuse to handle her hygiene personally. With a rueful shake of his head, he took her into the bathroom as usual and brushed her hair and teeth and washed her face. Over the days he had allowed their routines to blur, so that while he put her out of the bathroom while he handled private matters and showered himself, after that he had continued to tend to both of their brushing and washing in parallel, like this.

Pyjamas for both of them -- he dressed her in a soft satin camisole and shorts that Andrea had left today, both in a rich royal blue. She looked amazed, fingering the fabric at the hem when she thought he wasn’t looking, her eyes wet.

Mycroft lifted the covers and looked at her, and she slipped in. Mycroft followed her, aware that his own heart rate was elevated.

_It shouldn’t be._


	3. Grounding

She was as wide awake as he was, her small body trembling beside him.

As previous nights, he pulled her snugly against his side and began to pet her, flooding her central nervous system with soothing warmth and touch and smell. As she hid her face against his ribs, he alternately carded his fingers through her curls and scratched his nails lightly across her scalp. After a few minutes he began to stroke the skin on her upper back and arms, feeling gooseflesh follow in the wake of his fingertips time after time.

It was almost ten minutes before she even _began_ to relax. It was another ten before he judged her to be as relaxed as she was capable of getting right now. When her breathing was slow and deep and the shaking had subsided, he began to pull her hair the way that she liked. He started with a grip close to the roots that would feel pleasantly sexy to most people with a masochistic bent and many people without one. Willow groaned, muffling the sound against his ribs.

“Good girl,” Mycroft rumbled encouragingly.

He patiently continued this level of stimulation -- petting, scratching, and tugging her hair with one hand, stroking her skin with the other -- until she began to shift against his side. At first her movement was nearly imperceptible, but when he continued to praise her, her inhibitions continued to evaporate, her body communicating its enjoyment to him more openly.

It was almost another fifteen minutes until she gave him the sign that he’d been waiting for... tentatively at first, she began to pull in opposition to the hand wrapped in her hair. That meant that it was starting to hurt, and much more importantly that she _wanted_ it to hurt. In fact, she wanted it to hurt a little more than it was. Mycroft smiled in satisfaction where she could not see it and responded by tightening his fingers in her hair.

“Do you want me to continue, Willow?” he murmured, to see whether she could verbalize as well.

Her voice was slurred with pleasure. “Yes, Da--” she started to say, then tensed at her error and blurted, “Yes, _please_ ,” instead.

He gave a sharp pull at the base of her skull, harder than any previous one and insistent, to distract her from her slip. She liked it so much that she pressed her thighs together, moaning softly.

Mycroft closed his eyes, telling himself that he was absolutely not aroused in any way. He was doing this for careful, well-thought-out reasons, none of which had to do with how incredibly _appealing_ he found the idea of hurting her for her own good.

He took a breath. It was definitely time.

_For both of us._

“My dear girl,” Mycroft said, “For five days now I’ve been telling you that no one is going to hurt you anymore. But that doesn’t actually make you feel better, does it? Not exactly, anyway.”

As he spoke, he used his grip in her hair to anchor her skull where he wanted it, braced tight against his side. He trailed the fingertips on his right hand down her jawline, locating the spot that he was looking for, then slid his thumb around the ledge of her jaw and pushed upward, directly into a cluster of nerves. It would hurt, quite a bit more than having her hair pulled, but if Mycroft was right -- and he was certain by now that he was right -- it was going to send her much, much deeper rather than jarring her out of her deliciously receptive state.

Indeed, Willow’s body melted into his side, her fingers clutching at the fabric of his pyjamas, and she groaned again.

“I -- I’m sorry,” she whimpered, flustered.

Mycroft sighed heavily. “Actually, you may not apologize for this, Willow. This was _my_ error. My best efforts to take care of you through this difficult time have apparently been… incomplete, so far.”

He pressed his thumb in harder, increasing the pain gradually. This allowed her to adjust, so that he could find out at what point -- ah, _there_. She melted a second time, her limbs going soft, her lips parting, her eyelids fluttering. Instinctively she tilted her head back, further exposing the vulnerability that he was exploiting.

This girl didn’t merely like pain. She _loved_ it.

Mycroft rolled her onto her back, positioning himself on his side with his head propped up on his hand. She was so immersed in the pain that she barely noticed their change in positions. He drank in her expression, entranced by the purity of her absorption in suffering.

“Moriarty chose you even more carefully than I realized,” he said thoughtfully, rolling his thumb slightly to set new nerves firing.

She swallowed, trying to collect herself enough to respond. “What -- what do you mean?” she asked breathlessly.

"Nothing. Never mind that part, dear."

Mycroft could hear in her stilted cadence how deeply the conditioning went -- she kept biting off her sentences before she could end them by calling him by that wretched moniker. Moriarty had had several long years to train her, and Mycroft had no doubt that the worse she was suffering, the harder it would be for her to reign in the word.

Before he’d seen _this_ , the indisputable evidence of the responses that clear, sweet pain wrought in her young body, he would have thought it was a miscalculation to let her address him that way. He’d intended to teach her to call him by his given name eventually, anticipating that as she came to understand her place in a more normal world that the even footing with her benefactor would buoy her confidence. But of course, he’d been missing important data when he calculated that. This morning had provided the first clue, and here was the confirmation, plain to see.

Mycroft released his hold, easing his thumb slowly off the pressure point so that she had a moment to reorient herself. He watched her open her eyes, then close them for a few more breaths before chancing a second look. She blushed trying to meet his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she said again, for no reason.

Mycroft stroked her hair. “And what are you sorry for? That I misunderstood what you needed? That I misunderstood why Moriarty chose you? I ought to be apologizing to you, my dear. I was going to try to make you into something that you should never have to be.”

He felt relief course through the little body beside him at his words. “You mean I don’t have to learn to be a girl?”

A smile pulled at his lips as he stroked her arm. “Ah, Willow. I’m afraid that you are still going to have to learn how to be a girl. I can promise, however, that I will make you into a girl worth being." Oh, it was a relief to say it aloud this time. "The important point for you for right now, dear, is that becoming a girl _doesn’t_ mean that you have stop being my pet. And it doesn’t mean that you won’t need or want to feel pain.”

She sighed in relief at each of the important words -- at _pet_ , at _pain_.

He went on, growing more certain of his revised plan by the moment as he felt and saw her reaction. “You and I can go on as we have been. You will walk and talk and eat at the table because these things are my preference, but in all other respects you may continue to live as a pet. To remain in my company you need to obey me, but you are and will always remain free to retreat to your own bed in the closet in order to be left alone. Living like this will make things easier on you while you learn to also be a girl.”

Her eyes widened as she listened to this. “I can be both?” she asked, sounding dubious.

“Yes, Willow. People like you, people who enjoy pain, are special, and can learn how to be both person and pet. That’s why Moriarty chose you, but he was squandering you by reducing you to only one of them.”

He punctuated this point by trailing his fingers across the same pressure point on the other side of her jaw, and she responded to the mere promise of pain by tilting her head, eyelids fluttering. Goodness. Wherever Moriarty had found her, he must have paid a pretty penny. How had her captors and sellers figured out what a profound masochist she was when they were saving her to sell on the virgin's block? Mycroft made a note to himself to dig into that aspect of the trade.

“Now, then, little pet," he said to his ward, "I have something very important to tell you. Are you listening closely?” Mycroft put his fingers under her chin and tilted her head, staring into her confused green eyes.

“Yes -- _yes_. I -- I’m listening, I promise.” Again, the stilted cadence. It was clear that the worse he hurt her, the stronger her impulse was to address him as Moriarty had trained her.

“James Moriarty lied to you,” Mycroft said clearly, softly. “He lied to you about many things. But you know this, don’t you, clever girl?”

She chewed her lower lip uncertainly, then gave in and nodded. “Yes. _Yes_. I know. He _lied_ to me.”

“Yes, he did. And now I have a question for you, Willow. Do you know what the most important lie he ever told you was?”

She knew the answer, but she was afraid that she was wrong. She wanted to look away, in shame, but she was finding that she couldn't break eye contact with him without his permission. He had complete control of her now, he could feel it.

“Yes.” Willow's voice was whispery, broken.

“Tell me. What was the most important lie that Moriarty ever told you?”

“He told me that he was my daddy.” Her muttered words were barely audible.

Clever, _clever_ girl. “But was James Moriarty really your daddy, sweetheart?”

She shook her head adamantly, eyes still fixed on his, desperate to answer his questions correctly, to please him. And despite all the trauma she’d endured, despite how profoundly her nervous system was wired for fear, he knew that at this exact moment in time it was no longer fear that motivated her… no, now she was hoping that he would hurt her some more.

“Of course he wasn’t,” Mycroft said. “Moriarty stole you from people who never owned you in the first place, and he lied to you, and he raped you and he tortured you over and over and over for years. For all those reasons, I’m going to find him and be rid of him, so that _you_ are truly free of him and his lies and his false claims on you. You understand me, don’t you, pet?”

“Yes. I _knew_ he was lying.” There was real feeling in her voice now. She wasn’t merely trying to please him; she meant it.

“Yes, my clever girl, of course you did.”

Her eyes widened now with her growing sense of urgency. “ _You’re_ going to be my daddy now,” she blurted, breathlessly. “Aren’t you? My real daddy?”

Mycroft hid his startlement, keeping his expression smooth as he gazed down at her. Of course that had been where he’d been leading her, but in five days she hadn’t shown anything but terrified passivity, so he’d assumed he’d need to coach her each step of the way.

He kept his voice mild. “Yes, dear, that’s right. I am. You’re going to stay here with me now, and I am going to take care of you... I will feed you, and clothe you, and teach you. And I will also hurt you, sometimes, when you need it.”

“Yes, yes please, _Daddy_. _Thank you_ , Daddy.”

The word, the sincerity and desperation with which she said it, set off an avalanche of strange, intense feelings and reactions inside of him. Moriarty’s absurd fetish for referring to himself as Daddy had always grated deeply on Mycroft, so there was tremendous satisfaction in having usurped the title from Moriarty’s own hand-trained sex slave with nothing more than a little hair-pulling and a single pressure point.

And Mycroft’s own repressed sexual cravings had always involved the blurring of caretaking and sadism. Fantasy held little appeal for him, so he’d never imagined a woman calling him daddy, but he was acutely aware that the dynamic behind such roleplay was the thing that he craved most deeply on the rare occasions that he allowed himself to consider it... a sweet, helpless girl whose life and well-being was entirely in his hands.

Now he had one of those in his bed with him, wearing the guise of a legitimate professional interest... depending on how you defined the word 'legitimate.' Mycroft naturally defined it quite broadly, at least when it came to his own duties on behalf of Queen and Country.

“ _Please hurt me, Daddy,_ ” the girl implored Mycroft, blushing hotly.

He smiled as he gave her what she was begging for, for her own good.

This time Mycroft positioned the ball of his thumb over her right collarbone and wrapped his fingers over the top of her shoulder, squeezing, vise-like. She grunted, her eyelids fluttering again with pleasure.

He hurt her because she had asked nicely. He hurt her because he could, and apparently that was going to be an important part of their future together. He hurt her because he wanted to. And her response was blatantly sexual… Willow was arching her back, whimpering for more. His eyes tracked the lines of her throat as she swallowed and hummed.

“Yes, Daddy. _Thank you_ , Daddy...” She was slurring again, drunk on pain.

Damnation. Mycroft shifted on the bed, as if he were leveraging more of his upper body weight onto her protesting collarbone, but it was in fact a ploy to distract her from the raging erection that her mindless begging was provoking.

 _Daddy_. Until five minutes ago, he would have scoffed at any man who wanted a woman to call him that.

_Please hurt me, Daddy._

With a sinking feeling, Mycroft knew would hear those words echoing in his skull whenever he took himself in hand, for, he suspected, the rest of his life.

For a moment he didn’t know if she was actually repeating them or he was simply replaying them to himself. He was aware that he was applying enough pressure to her collarbone now that her moan had evolved into a pained gurgle, her eyes pleading with him. He eased up and she panted, green eyes dark and fixed on him with desperation and adoration.

Goodness. Once Mycroft had solved the puzzle earlier today, he had planned to achieve this outcome tonight, if for no other reason than at least to confirm the theory. But he certainly had _not_ counted on bringing them both this far, this fast. He’d been prepared and fascinated to introduce a measure of pain into their bedtime routine, once he’d figured out that the girl was such a profound masochist that she was bereft without it, but he sure as hell hadn’t planned for it to provoke her ( _them both_ ) like this.

He was pausing, giving himself a moment to take her measure and his own in spite of the fact that the girl clearly badly wanted more. Her nipples were stiff beneath the soft satin of her slip, and Mycroft was aware of the faint musk of her increasing arousal among the sheets. Her skin was flushed anywhere it wasn’t bruised, and her pupils were blown as wide open as her masochistic little heart.

“Ah, my dear girl," he said, eyes shining in appreciation. "You are absolutely exquisite. You are a _treasure_.”

“I -- the only -- _please_ , _Daddy_ ,” she hitched, frustration in her voice, clearly unsure how to respond to his praise. Her body squirmed beneath him, trying to entice him to keep touching her. “ _Please_.”

To _hurt_ her again.

“Shh,” Mycroft said, brushing her sweat-damp hair away from her forehead, considering how much more pain he could inflict on her tonight without needing to retreat to a bracingly cold shower before he had any hope of sleeping thereafter. There were tears in her eyes now, and Mycroft was fascinated to see how deep her genuine need ran in this area. Now that the mystery was unraveling, he was surprised that she had made it through five days of his constant reassurance that no one would ever hurt her again.

“ _Willow_.”

He didn’t say her name loudly, but he put a slight edge in his voice, and she quickly subsided into stillness beneath him. For a time her fear of him had been subsumed in her arousal, but it surged back to the surface now. Mycroft squeezed again over her collarbone, to focus her.

“I’m sorry, Daddy,” she said softly, eyes wide. He was going to have to train the urge to apologize whenever she was uncertain out of her.

“My good girl.” He moved his palm downward, over her breastbone, and spread his long fingers across the flush on her upper chest, giving her the gentle sensation of pressing her down into the bed. She sighed.

“I’m going to hurt you one last time for tonight, Willow, then we’re both going to sleep. This will be much harder than what you've taken for me so far, and you may allow your body to respond however it likes. You will not be in trouble.”

Her eyes shone. “Oh, Daddy. _Thank you._ ”

Mycroft leaned over her -- it had been a long time since he’d done this, and he knew that he definitely needed to keep his lower body well away from hers. It was shameful, his reactions to such a young girl, but he told himself forcefully that it wouldn’t have been happening if he hadn’t neglected himself in favor of Queen and Country for so long.

He chose a patch of skin that was unmarked by Moriarty, and her young flesh was enticingly soft between his teeth, the clean taste of her sweet on his tongue, as he bit into her with slow, careful control. He started out painful but not brutal, biting into the upper inner swell of her breast as he continued to soothe her body with his hands in the ways that worked so well. She whimpered softly, and for the first time she moved her own hands to rest on the back of Mycroft's head, twining into his dark, damp hair.

He flattened her with his weight, rolling on top of her and reaching up to bury both of his hands in her hair now. He used a tight grip to hold her skull immobile against the pillow, his outstretched arms putting pressure on her aching clavicles again, as he intensified the bite very, very slowly over an excruciatingly long span of time. The slow, burning escalation combined with her immobility allowed her to endure an intense level of pain, and would also leave a beautiful, florid bruise, the first of his own. Her vocalizations increased, and her body squirmed slightly, but she intuitively understood that she was to stay as still as possible.

After a while, Willow started losing track of herself, squeezing her thighs together, her stomach tightening. Her fingers scrabbled in the hair at Mycroft's nape, and he closed his eyes in chagrin, silencing the noise that he nearly made. He had to force himself to stay focused on what he was doing. He could have interrupted her, taken her wrists, but he didn’t want to disrupt what was happening elsewhere in her body, and her fingers moving mindlessly over the back of his head.

His teeth were close to breaking her skin now, particularly his incisors. With regret, he stopped increasing the pressure and merely held on. He relinquished his grip on her hair and skull and placed his hands on her hips instead, pressing her down into the bed firmly. He knew that, if she was still physiologically capable of orgasm, that she would be close to it now. Mycroft grabbed her right wrist and maneuvered her hand downward, between their bodies, urging it toward her lower abdomen. He heard her slide her fingers immediately into the slickness that he’d provoked, and within seconds the other hand in his hair was gone, that arm sliding around his neck and tensing.

He tightened his fingers on her hips, knowing that his fingertips were going to be clearly discernable tomorrow, which was clearly exactly what she needed. She coiled, as tense from tip to toe as possible, and then gasped loudly and repeatedly as her body finally released. His grip let him feel the rhythmic contractions through her lower pelvis and he was fairly certain that it was a true orgasm wracking her body in spite of the extensive damage to her clitoris. He found himself wishing that he could see her, but he turned all of his other senses to recording every detail of the event.

She came hard and long beneath him and he kept his hold on her with his teeth throughout. Though long years of practice his dismissed the clamoring of intense frustration in his own body, continuing to pay close attention to her vitals. Eventually she shuddered and began to peter out, but Mycroft took a deep breath and then dug in his teeth just a tiny bit more, causing two small punctures. He tasted the tang of copper in his mouth and, exactly as he predicted, the unexpected renewed pain pushed her back up out of resolution and into a second orgasm. This time she wailed -- most women did, if you pulled such a dirty trick -- and she grabbed him and clung to him with no hint of self-consciousness.

Mycroft slowly began to relax his jaw as he let her come down for real this time, cradled tightly in his arms and sobbing loudly. He let his weight shift to one side and snaked that arm beneath her shoulders. He gently rocked her through the storm, doing his best to wrap her in a cocoon of safety as she slowly subsided from her pleasure back to the real world.

By the time he fully separated his teeth from her skin her sobs had become softer and gentler, and when Mycroft peered down at her, her eyelids were clearly heavy. Good. Perfect. It would take little soothing to move her straight into sleep, which meant that he wouldn’t have to evaluate her reactions to these new developments until the morning, when his own head was also clearer. He stroked her hair as she cried herself out, holding her closer than he had any previous night, aware how much safer she would feel in his arms now that he’d unlocked the missing factor in his analysis. He wondered if she would pull back as she resolved, but she didn’t, turning her nose into his armpit and cocking her upper leg so her knee rested on the front of his thigh.

She was asleep quickly, and she slept deeply and without any nightmares, which pleased him.

Mycroft, on the other hand, lay awake long into the night, knowing that he had handled the situation exactly correctly and yet disturbed that his own reactions had not been at all what he expected.


	4. Cultivation of Resources

The next morning, Willow was noticeably less anxious. By lunch, two new events had occurred, both of which Mycroft found highly edifying… after breakfast, she came to him and pressed her head into his hand of her own initiative, actively seeking comfort and touch from him. Then, after she was sufficiently soothed, at the time when she would normally curl up under his desk while he worked, she picked up one of the novels that he’d selected to leave within her reach and took it with her.

She chose _Wind in the Willows_ , which made Mycroft smile with the memory of reading it to Sherlock when the boy was three. He watched her out of the corner of his eye. Her rate of reading was slow for a girl her age, and she tended to mouth the words to herself as she worked her way through the text, but she didn’t skip words that she found difficult, instead taking the time to sound them out. The new data further confirmed the hypothesis that he’d been forming, that she was probably reasonably bright by normal standards, but woefully undereducated. At least she could read at all, he supposed.

He had to spend the afternoon at his Diogenes Club office, and returned on the late side for dinner. He’d left Andrea as the girl’s chaperone, preferring for now to avoid John’s inevitable judgment regarding the new marks that Mycroft had inflicted on the girl. After dinner, he took her to the extra bedroom which he’d had set up as his gym. Willow’s confused frown made it clear that she’d never seen anything of the sort before.

“Watch,” he told her, and turned on the treadmill at a sedate walking pace. After demonstrating the concept, he helped her onto the belt and pressed both of her hands onto the rails. “Keep your hands here.”

She seemed strong enough, and not too alarmed by the unfamiliarity, but it was clear that she was concentrating on her breathing and balance in order to follow Mycroft’s instructions. Perfect. He wanted her half-distracted, and it was time to start rebuilding her physical strength, so he’d been hoping very much to achieve both ends simultaneously.

Mycroft sat down in the nearby chair and opened her novel and began to read aloud to her. It didn’t take long to determine that her auditory tracking was superior to her reading skills, and after a few minutes to get used to the treadmill she began to occasionally close her eyes to focus on his words for long passages. At the end of the next chapter Mycroft closed the book and set it aside, taking the opportunity to observe her.

She looked up again, but he made no move to take her off the treadmill -- it had only been about ten minutes, and the easy pace hadn’t exhausted her yet.

“It would please me to take you out walking in St. James Park,” Mycroft said, “but I don’t think you’ll be able to leave the flat without another panic attack until I can assure you that James Moriarty is off the streets, do you?”

She chewed her lip. “No, Daddy,” she admitted reluctantly.

“It’s not unreasonable, Willow,” he reassured her. “And yet the problem remains. And it’s a problem I would like to resolve quickly.”

He permitted the silence to stretch out, letting her work it out. He knew that she had when she used the same buttons that she’d watched him press to increase the speed of the treadmill. He hid a rueful smile at her first attempt to self-soothe a surge of agitation, instead of needing his hands on her for it. There was a slight, strange pang in his chest. He preferred her dependent on him, truth be told.

“What do you want me to talk about?” she finally asked flatly, staring at the display on the treadmill.

Mycroft tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair. “Everything. Everything that you can remember, both about how he behaved and everything that you overheard. I don't think he was very careful about what he discussed with Moran when you were around. The more you can tell me, the faster I can find him and put an end to this.”

Another long silence. It was clearly a difficult conversation for her, as he’d anticipated.

She was starting to strain to keep walking by the time that she spoke again. Mycroft was considering taking her off the treadmill soon, confident that her young body would build strength quickly but not wanting to shake her confidence by overdoing it.

“I understand, Daddy,” she said grimly, and the words had barely left her mouth before Mycroft darted out of his chair, having just observed that her right leg was weakening and she was about to crumple.

He managed to grab her and lift her clear of the belt before she went down, though the weakness with which she clung to him made it clear that he had done so just in time. Mycroft followed the moment by sweeping her up in his arms as he had that first night, just shy of a week ago, and he carried the trembling girl back to his chair and folded her in against his chest. He was pleased that he could feel the difference in her weight, and not too concerned about her response to the topic. He’d expected the moment to be difficult, and yet she had agreed, and Mycroft was content to give her another night to brace herself before he dug any harder.

The next afternoon John was due to come by the flat to check on her progress in healing. Mycroft wished that he could simply tell the girl to keep the livid bite mark on her upper chest and the bruises on her hips hidden from John -- well, he _could_ have, but he was fairly certain that such secret-mongering would have had a detrimental effect on what he was trying to accomplish with her. The better route forward, given what he now knew about her, was to find a way to reconcile John to Mycroft’s new methods, but Mycroft didn’t entertain any notions about the inevitability of John’s disapproval.

Mycroft was reading dossiers on the settee with the girl’s head on his thigh when he heard Sherlock let himself and John into the flat. She’d been working her way through the next chapter of her book, but had recently tired and let herself doze off with Mycroft’s fingers carding through her hair. Resuming physical activity had worn her out.

She started awake violently at the sound of someone other than Mycroft in the flat, her heart pounding.

“Shh.” He gently scratched behind her ear. “It’s quite all right, it’s only John and Sherlock.”

She sat up, taking deep breaths to calm herself, and followed Mycroft as he rose and went to the front of the flat.

“Hello, Willow,” John said brightly, pulling his stethoscope out of his bag and laying it over his shoulders with a practiced motion as Sherlock made a beeline for Mycroft’s fridge and began to dig through it.

“Hello, John,” she responded shyly, perching on one of the tall chairs at the breakfast bar. “Hello, Sherlock,” she added, earning a brief but considering glance from Mycroft’s little brother.

“Finally making progress, Mycroft?” Sherlock asked. “You must be bribing her with food, since I can’t imagine that it’s your company that’s helping.”

“An amusing accusation coming from someone currently raiding my larder,” Mycroft observed.

“Boys,” John said chidingly, moving over to Willow, who held herself still to avoid flinching from him. “Don’t pay attention to them, dear. You get used to the bickering after a while.”

Mycroft noted with amusement that Willow was glaring at Sherlock in dislike.

John listened to the girl’s heart and lungs and checked each of the contusions and lacerations that he had deemed to require dressing or to be at risk for infection. It was when he was manipulating her jaw relative to her shoulders to ensure that the swelling from Moriarty’s hands around her neck was going down that he caught sight of the edge of the new bruise.

Mycroft watched John freeze for a second before tugging her collar aside.

“That’s fine,” Willow snapped, swatting John’s hand and pulling away.

Mycroft was surprised that she’d inferred John’s likely feelings about the mark and its implications. The doctor merely frowned, but Mycroft noted how carefully he was holding himself in order to conceal the intensity of his disapprobation from her.

“I should swab that. The skin is broken,” John said mildly, without looking over at Mycroft.

“Barely,” she mumbled, twisting away from him, sliding off of the chair and moving to Mycroft. She insinuated herself under his arm and turned her face away from the other men, against his side.

John’s expression was stormy, and Sherlock was pulling out of the fridge and peering at them quizzically, exquisitely attuned to any disturbance in John Watson’s mood no matter how much he pretended otherwise.

Mycroft squeezed Willow gently. “Go put yourself on the treadmill, dear.”

“Daddy --” she mumbled into his side, too softly for the others to hear.

“ _Now_.” Mycroft put a slight edge on the word, and Willow shuddered and pulled herself away from him, leaving the room with a nervous glance over her shoulder. 

John started to speak, and Mycroft cut him off. “She was upset. It calmed her down. I knew what I was doing.”

“What did he do?” Sherlock asked.

“I bit her, quite hard.” Mycroft refused to allow either of them to form the impression that he wanted to hide what he’d done.

John was reddening. “I fail to see how _hurting_ a child who has been _tortured_ and _raped_ for the last several years would _calm her down_.” He wasn’t yelling, but Mycroft was fairly sure he would have been if Willow hadn’t been just down the hallway.

“You witnessed her responses just now. Did she seem traumatized when she pushed you away instead of passively allowing you to do whatever you intended, the way she would have a week ago? Did she seem frightened of me when she immediately came to me to protect her from your unwanted attention?”

There was a twitch in the muscle of John’s jaw. “Stockholm Syndrome --”

“--nicely describes why she didn’t try harder to escape from Moriarty for the past three years. It does not, however, describe her attachment to the security of this location and my company. In fact, I was in danger of compromising that security if I hadn’t begun introducing a small measure of controlled pain.”

Sherlock spoke with his mouth full. “Moriarty managed to acclimatize her to such a degree? How?”

“Well, it’s certainly true that the only pleasure or comfort she ever received from him was on the heels of the most extensive torture, so yes, he amplified the effect. But I believe the more significant factor to be her natural and profound masochism, which was clearly the main reason that he selected her.”

Neither psychology nor sexuality were areas of much interest to Sherlock, but both Moriarty and the manipulation of human beings were, and he looked passingly intrigued. John, however, was clearly not yet appeased.

“Look, fine, obviously I’ve encountered masochists in my own --” John hesitated, “ _travels_ , but Jesus, Mycroft, she’s a _kid_. She needs to be taught that she _doesn’t_ need to be hurt, not indulged in whatever sick ideas Moriarty put in her head. What would make you think --”

“She’s hardly a normal kid, John.” Surprisingly, it was Sherlock who interrupted this time. Mycroft glanced appraisingly at his brother, and saw some kind of recognition in his eyes. Well, it made sense, he supposed. Neither Mycroft nor Sherlock had been “normal” children who behaved as expected either, but Sherlock had certainly suffered more for his inability to mimic normal childhood behavior when convenient.

John also looked surprised at Sherlock taking Mycroft’s side. “Sherlock, you didn’t see the bruise. He didn’t just nip her. It was purple, and I could see every detail of Mycroft’s dental history.”

“I held her down for over five minutes,” Mycroft supplied evenly, raising a brow at his brother.

Sure enough, he saw a flash of recognition cross Sherlock’s face, and hid a sigh of relief. While Sherlock was no masochist in the sense that Willow was -- there was no link to his non-existent sexuality -- a little well-modulated pain from Mycroft had provided an avenue for him to focus in times of panic on a couple of occasions before he learned to control it himself, when he was very small.

John made a noise of disgust. “Mycroft, you can’t just do this. It’s not acceptable.”

“What are you going to do, John, call Child Protection on him?” Sherlock, his own curiosity on the matter clearly satisfied, was returning his attention to the large slice of cake that he’d produced from the fridge.

John looked frustrated. Now that Mycroft had Sherlock’s comprehension, he was no longer worried about John’s response, but it would certainly make his life easier to disarm it further.

Mycroft raised his hands placatingly. “I am willing to make a deal with you, John, if it would ease your mind. After all, you are Willow’s doctor, and speaking out of concern for her well-being. A concern which I remind you that I share.”

John looked wary. “What deal?”

“My plan has always been that, were I to find Willow unresponsive to my own strategies, Anthea would be the next to take custody of her, in the assumption that a female guardian might be more effective. You are welcome to continue to check in on Willow weekly even after it is not medically necessary, and if at any point you believe that she seems more and not less traumatized than the previous week, I will agree to place her with Anthea for the following week.”

John clearly didn’t like it, but another glance at Sherlock’s non-concern clarified for him that he was alone in this. He narrowed his eyes at Mycroft. “And you would actually do that? Just change your plan on my say-so?”

 _Of course not._ “Of course I would, John.”

Well, the army doctor was halfway mollified.

Mycroft pushed forward. “And I assume that even you agree that this week, she is obviously much less traumatized than when you first saw her?”

John looked annoyed. “Yes, obviously. But she would be, wouldn’t she? A week ago she was starving and didn’t yet believe she’d been rescued.”

“Yes, yes.” Mycroft waved this away. “But if I am stepping wrongly, it will out in the next several weeks, and you’ll step in to protect her.” Mycroft put delicate emphasis on the last words, knowing how deeply John’s white knight syndrome was knitted into the marrow of his bones.

There. John’s face finally softened, not all the way, but enough. Sherlock was finishing his slice of cake -- they must have wrapped up a case earlier today for his little brother to have such an appetite, for sweets no less.

From there, Mycroft was able to leverage Sherlock’s impatience and disinterest to get them both out the door. It had been twelve minutes since Mycroft sent the girl to the treadmill, and while he expected her to pass fifteen today, her collapse yesterday was still on his mind.

He hurried to his gym and found that she’d set it higher than he liked, once again providing a clear indicator of her level of agitation. Her face was set in a look of intense concentration and her lips moved as she again silently coached herself through an act that she found difficult. He paused in the doorway to read her lips before she noticed him.

_Daddy told you to stay here. Daddy told you to stay here._

Mycroft felt a strong feeling rise up inside of him, unexpected on the heels of his recent cool-headed maneuvering of John Watson. This was -- what _was_ this? He realized he was frowning deeply as the girl noticed him there and looked up, clearly anxious to find out what had occurred in her absence. Mycroft had intended to reassure her quickly -- he didn’t need her to experience any more anxiety than necessary at this critical juncture in her healing. But for almost three seconds, he found himself so overcome with his own reaction to her self-talk that he couldn’t figure out what he should be saying to her.

 _Daddy told you to stay here_ , she was telling herself _._ And so ‘here’ she had stayed.

_Gratification. Desire. Arousal. Affection. Longing._

Those were words for the various things he was feeling.

Mycroft was well used to people obeying him. Why should this feel so very different?

With a great act of will, Mycroft shoved it all down. He could analyze it later. Right now he had a frightened ward to manage. She was off the treadmill, coming into his arms, clinging to him, her face turned up to him with fear written on it. Her alarm cut through the haze of his own confusion, and Mycroft gathered her up and pulled her into the chair, onto his lap.

“Don’t worry, dear Willow. I’ve explained everything to Dr. Watson and he is quite understanding. He will continue to provide your medical care and we’ll have no further issues with him misunderstanding any marks I leave on you.”

He felt her body relax in his arms, and she nuzzled her face into his chest, sighing in relief. Her arms snaked around his neck without hesitation or fear.

“Can a doctor take me from you, Daddy?” she whispered.

“No one can take you from me, sweetheart,” Mycroft replied, squeezing her gently. “No one will ever have the power to do that.”

And once again, he took the deluge of reactions that surged inside of him at her trust and attachment to him and stored it firmly under lock and key, telling himself that he would take the time to sort it all sometime soon.

And he determinedly ignored the knowledge that he was lying to himself.


	5. Trigger

While Willow showed no signs of being generally talkative -- a trait that had factored highly into Mycroft’s offer to allow her to stay in his custody as long as she liked -- over the next several days, with his careful prompting, she began to open up about Moriarty. After some experimentation it became clear that it was easiest for her to talk during her daily time on the treadmill, and that her openness was further improved when he situated his chair out of her line of sight.

Whenever she spoke about him her demeanor was strangely calm and detached, very much as if she were relaying a story that she had read, a story about someone else. Mycroft understood this to be normal for extreme trauma, a form of dissociation. Fortunately his primary goal at the moment was intelligence, not her recovery, so this mechanism served him well. He could always manipulate her into fully processing the details of the trauma later, if she stayed with him and if he wanted her to. For now he avoided making her talk much about the things that Moriarty had done to her, always redirecting her to information about his behavior and activities.

The emotional storms always came later, often after he had tucked her between his sheets for the night. He found that they were easy to interrupt with pain on nights when he needed rest, but he was aware that overuse of this strategy would disrupt the trauma processing that he _did_ wish to occur, so most nights he soothed her through it with his fingers in her hair and his palms on her skin instead. There were usually nightmares either way, but they were considerably less severe on the nights when he gave her pain.

As the act of hurting her became more familiar, he found it easier to curb his own responses in the moment, and by the end of the second week he was able to will away the erections that had plagued him at first. Between his knowledge of pressure points and predicament holds and her affinity for being bitten, he was able to keep the act relatively platonic, other than letting her orgasm during the peak of the encounter. He quickly learned that she was capable of climaxing emotionally from pain without any physiological orgasm, and while this also generally culminated in tears, they were obviously tears of relief and release.

Unfortunately, the willpower to control his body in the moment didn’t appear to lead to the willpower to control it overall, and halfway through the second week he gave in and resumed taking himself in hand in the privacy of the shower. He had imagined some purity of purpose that would allow him to repeatedly hurt a willing girl who loved the attention without requiring his own release, but it turned out to be a chimera, and the truth was that before he capitulated he was finding himself more and more distracted at times when he needed to be focused on his work. At first he tried to think of more appropriate women during those moments -- lovers from his university days, subjects he’d interrogated, _anyone_ for whom the onset of puberty was at least a decade in their past. Eventually he gave up on that as well and allowed his imagination to carry him down the ugly road of what he wanted to do to the girl that it was actually his job to protect, then scrubbed himself nearly raw after he was done.

But they found an equilibrium of sorts, and by the time of John’s two week check-up she had grown over a centimeter, put on over half a stone, and only the purple-green shadows of her worst bruises from Moriarty remained. Her reading speed had also nearly doubled, and sometimes he found her sitting at the window on the side of the flat that looked out toward the park, watching the passers-by with interest.

Mycroft relayed all of this to John smugly, who reluctantly admitted that the girl’s recovery appeared to be progressing faster than John had expected it to. The doctor went on his way without more than a cursory grumble about three new bite marks and the handful of thumb-shaped bruises that marked pressure points from her jaw to the back of her knee. Mycroft was fairly sure that Sherlock had said something persuasive to the good doctor in the time since his last visit.

It was during the third week that Willow began to perch on the high chair at the breakfast bar instead of watching from the floor as he cooked for them, and he realized that she was closely observing his technique. He brought her chair around the bar and situated it where she would be out of the way but better able to see, and began educating her on the basics as he worked. It didn’t take long to realize that she became agitated, looking away and having difficulty tracking his words, whenever he had a knife in his hand, and that she had a hard time not checking on the location of the knife constantly even when he had put it down.

On the third night, Mycroft deliberately placed her chair closer to where he preferred to work at his cutting board. Sure enough, she leaned away from him when he picked up the Misono and began to swiftly chop the vegetables on the board, her breathing tight, clearly hoping he wouldn’t notice.

Mycroft paused in his work and turned to her, raising a brow. She blushed bright red and looked down, radiating shame.

“Give me your hand, Willow,” he said, to see if she could do it.

Her eyes flew back to his face, wide and alarmed. “Wh-what?” she stuttered.

It was the first time she’d done anything other than comply immediately with a direct instruction from him. Mycroft allowed his other brow to travel to the height of the one that was already arched, manufacturing a look of annoyance that he didn't feel.

“You heard me,” he said, sharper now. He transferred the Misono to his left hand with a dangerous little toss and held out his right one, palm up, for hers.

She was shaking, closer to a full-blown panic attack than he’d seen her since the first week of her liberation. Every other time he’d responded with immediate comfort, but today he was curious to begin to test the limits of what he could push her into, especially given what the intricacies of desensitizing such a dramatic trigger were going to be. So instead he simply looked at her expectantly, hand waiting for hers.

“D-daddy. _Please_.” Her voice was broken, shaking as badly as her hands.

He tilted his head, eyes fixed on hers. “You know the rule, dear. You’re free to leave my company at any time.” She hadn’t shown the inclination to spend much time in her bed in the closet, though she sometimes now liked to read there when he left her in the care of Andrea, so he knew that it wasn’t disagreeable to her. She’d never once used it to avoid obedience though, and Mycroft was genuinely unsure if she was about to. He tried to pretend that he wasn’t finding the question slightly thrilling, but he wasn’t very convincing to himself.

With agonized slowness Willow lifted her shaking hand and placed it on top of his palm. Mycroft wrapped his fingers around her slender wrist, holding it tightly. She began to cry, then, tears running freely down her cheeks, though she struggled to hold in the accompanying sobs.

“I’m not going to cut you,” Mycroft said, moving the gleaming steel in his left hand toward her skin. She began to gasp, and he realized that her shaking was far too violent to place the sharp edge of the blade anywhere near her, no matter how firm his grasp. Instead he laid the back edge across the thin skin on the back of her hand, sliding it gently across her epidermis.

She lost control of her breathing and hurled herself backward. Mycroft felt and saw the coming motion just in time to lift the blade and release her wrist, and she stumbled before she caught herself, knocking the chair to the floor. In her panic she automatically dropped to the floor and scrambled backward away from him on all fours, unable to restrain her sobs as she scurried from the kitchen and toward the bedroom.

Mycroft watched her go, lips pursed thoughtfully. It was going to take some time to calm her down, he knew, but he decided to get the vegetables into the roasting pan on a temperature much lower than he’d planned first. In the meantime he pulled his phone from his pocket and dialed Andrea as he returned to chopping the evening's asparagus, giving her elaborate instructions about the files that he wanted her to prepare as soon as possible for his next intervention.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mycroft's knife, for any other fetishists out there: http://korin.com/HMI-UXGY-210?sc=27&category=280073


	6. Hierarchical Desensitization

Her time on the treadmill was up to nearly an hour a day at a moderate walking pace, so the next day Mycroft had plenty of time to steer her onto the topic of Moriarty’s mutilation of her body and then away from it again. Conveniently, he’d been able to mine enough useful information out of what she’d already given him that he believed that he and Sherlock were closing in on Moriarty’s likely location again, so he didn’t even have to begrudge taking the time to deal with the personal aspect of the issue.

Used to the process by now, she was able to maintain her strange detachment even as she described being repeatedly tied down and having tissue carved from her genitals in incremental chunks. The only sign of her distress was her thumb on the treadmill speed, to the point where Mycroft had to instruct her to stop increasing it. She’d not yet had decent nutrition for long enough for him to permit her a jog.

As Mycroft had suspected, Moriarty had drawn the mutilation process out, taunting the girl about the fact that neither of them could know which cut might be the one to destroy her sexual response, leaving her anorgasmic. She was unclear on what parts of her anatomy had accrued the most damage, though Mycroft knew from John that most of the tissue removal had been from her labia and clitoral hood, with the damage to her clitoris consisting of relatively clean cuts.

Mycroft was sure to get her focused on Moriarty’s other behavior with a good twenty minutes left, enough time that there was little threat of another panic attack by the time he called a halt and sent her to the shower to clean up before dinner. He was aware that her nerves had been building throughout the day, but he placed her beside him at the counter and began to prepare the evening’s ingredients without showing any interest in provoking her phobia again. With some careful effort he managed to fully engage her in a conversation about alternative strategies for mincing onions efficiently, and by the time he was throwing ingredients into sizzling oil, she displayed a level of apprehension about the knives on the counter no more intense than the night before he pushed her.

After dinner, instead of taking her to his office for his evening reading, Mycroft instructed her to remain at the table while he cleared. Once the surface was wiped down, he seated himself beside her with the folder that Andrea had presented to him earlier in the day.

He pulled out the top page and set it before her. There were thirty small images arranged across the page, varied from a large, serrated hunting knife to a surgeon’s scalpel.

“Which one of these do you find most frightening, Willow?” Mycroft asked gently, sliding his fingers into her hair and scratching.

She froze, staring at the page in trembling fear. Each image was small, far removed from reality, but detailed enough to easily distinguish one from the next. Pocket knife and paring knife. Boning knife and crafting blade. Multi-tool and chef’s knife, similar to the Misono that had started it all.

She looked up at him, and he smiled and nodded reassuringly back at the page. “You can do this, because I want you to do this, my dear girl,” he told her. “Now... which one?”

She turned her attention back to the images. Mycroft’s fingers carded through her curls, his palm smoothing the soft skin from the nape of her neck down her spine. It took a long time, but he was patient. She kept glancing at him uncertainly, and each time he nodded back at the page with a reassuring smile.

She took a deep breath, and focused.

She studied the page for nearly seven minutes, her eyes moving from one tiny image to the next, from the paper to Mycroft and back. He’d been prepared to be patient, though, and was careful not to let the slightest sign that she might interpret as annoyance cross his face. He stroked her and soothed her as she examined each image, noting the reactions that she tried to hide.

Eventually she raised a trembling finger, and laid it on one of the larger pocket knives. Her eyes were wet when she looked up at him, and Mycroft gave her an approving smile and leaned in to press a kiss to her forehead.

“My good girl. Thank you.”

Mycroft noted her selection, and carefully thumbed through the other pages that Andrea had prepared, pulling one free and exchanging it for the one on the table. It was filled with images of larger, higher-end pocket knives, mostly Benchmades and Spydercos and Gerbers.

She took a long, shuddering breath as she looked over the images on this page, and Mycroft knew that they were moving in the right direction. Again he worked his fingers into her curls and soothed her as he waited, and she studied each image carefully in spite of her intense discomfort.

Only four minutes, this time, before she laid her finger on an image in the second-to-last row. It was a Spyderco, though Andrea had grouped the blades by aesthetics and not maker, since the girl would almost certainly be going on appearance alone.

Mycroft produced a third page filled with knives of a similar shape, all with menacing, leaf-shaped blades and fully metal construction. Most here were Spydercos, though he recognized a number of knock-offs inspired by the brand as well. When he put it in front of her, at first she refused to look down, staring at him with pleading eyes.

“You can do this,” he told her again, reaching up and cupping her face in his palms.

“I don’t want to,” she said in a wobbling voice.

“I know, sweetheart.”

She blinked, took a deep breath, and began to examine the page. This time she took one thorough look at each image and moved on, and within a minute she put her finger on the page and looked away.

“That’s the one. That’s his,” she said flatly, unable to meet Mycroft’s eyes.

He made a mental note and shuffled the papers away, then led the now-shaking girl to the office for their evening routine.

He knew that she would have an idea of what must be coming, and that dragging it out was only going to make it harder on her, so he cleared his schedule for Sunday, which was two days out, and spent as much of the intervening time as possible petting her and soothing her central nervous system. He also gave her a break from talking about Moriarty during her next appointment with the treadmill, instead prompting her to talk about _A Wrinkle in Time_ , her current novel. John came by for her one-month check-up, and left satisfied that she was continuing to progress, and particularly pleased with her weight gain.

The uncomfortable truth was that Mycroft was looking forward to it. Obviously he spent a great deal of his time anticipating various reactions and scenarios -- it was, after all, what he did for a living -- but this was as much pleasant fantasy as it was analysis and planning.

Sunday he woke her early, wanting her underslept, a little off balance. He gave her toast and juice, then put her on the treadmill for an hour at eight kph, having finally gotten John’s clearance the previous day for higher-impact exercise. By the end she was sweaty and exhausted, and he took her to his en suite and cleaned her up himself, brushing her hair and tying it back, scrubbing her from tip to toe. He dressed her in a simple but comfortable frock of luxurious silk that he’d acquired for the occasion after an embarrassing amount of consideration, then fed her a more substantial brunch, one that wouldn’t sit too heavily in her stomach.

She was unusually subdued, which was saying something, as the vast majority of the time she only spoke in response to prompting anyway. But he was aware how exquisitely sensitive victims of extended trauma tended to become to subtle shifts in routine and mood and what they might portend, and he’d certainly given her enough clues that he didn’t intend to permit her phobia to persist for long. Right now he was reading her as full of dread more than anxiety, but he knew that all that was about to change.

Mycroft took her hand and led her to the sitting room, where he’d closed all of the velvet drapes overlooking the park. He led her to one of the heavy, high-backed chairs situated near the window instead of to the more comfortable wingback chairs before the fireplace.

“Have a seat, Willow,” he instructed.

She looked at him, swallowed, and sat down gingerly on the edge of the chair. He put his hand on her sternum and pressed her back, then lifted her hands and placed them on the arms of the chair.

“Like this, dear. You understand?”

“Yes, Daddy.” Her voice was small, and she was staring at her knees.

Mycroft picked up the small side table and placed it two feet in front of her. He stood on the far side and slid his hands into his pockets.

“Look at me, sweetheart.”

Willow looked up at him unhappily.

“I am _not_ going to cut you. Do you understand me?”

She was trying to control her breathing, but not doing a very good job of it.

“Yes, Daddy. I understand.”

He held her gaze. “Have I ever lied to you, Willow?”

She thought about it for a moment before she answered. “No, Daddy. You’ve never lied to me.” That wasn’t technically true, but as long as she didn’t know the difference it would remain effective enough... and she would never know the difference.

“Good girl. So do you believe me, then, when I tell you that I’m not going to cut you?”

“Y-yes, Daddy.”

“Good. Then please say it.”

She sniffed. “You -- you are not going to cut me, Daddy.”

Mycroft produced the knife from his trouser pocket and laid it, still folded, in the middle of the table. Her breathing tightened considerably, but it was clear that she’d been braced for its appearance, and she didn’t seem to be moving into a full-blown panic yet.

He circled around behind her chair, trailing his hand over her shoulder. Her muscles were rock hard under his palms, and he could see the clench in her jaw. He slipped his fingers into her hair, locating the spot on the back of her skull where gentle scratching almost always sent a shudder down to her toes. He trailed his nails back and forth across it, patiently, repeatedly. When it failed to evoke the usual response, he switched to carding his fingers through the rest of her curls, then to stroking her shoulders and the column at the back of her neck.

“I’m right here with you, Willow. I’m not going to do anything that you can’t handle, and I’m going to help you handle everything that I do.”

“I trust you, Daddy.” She didn’t sound entirely convincing at the moment, but Mycroft didn’t take it personally, given the provocation.

He cycled patiently through all of the techniques that he had learned to soothe her. He was pleased that he’d not had to tamp down on true panic this early in the process, but her grim intensity was impressive, and he knew that he was going to have to dial it down degree by careful degree. There would be no shortcuts today.

Not that he wanted them, really. He was enjoying this already, and anticipated a delicate and engrossing challenge ahead.

He pressed his palms down her upper arms, then slid fingers down her jawline and briefly pressed into the cluster of nerves under her jaw. Her head tilted only minutely… she was still too detached from her body to enjoy it, so he moved back to stroking and petting her.

“You are safe,” he told her gently and repeatedly as he worked on her. “You are here, with me, in my home, and you are _safe_. You will always be safe here, and you will always be safe with me.”

She sighed. Degree, by careful degree.

It was twenty-four minutes before he was able to get a response from the hot spot buried beneath her head of curls, and thirty-seven before the application of mild pain was effective to release a measure of strain from her muscles.

At fifty-four minutes he was satisfied. She was still miserable, but her body was, if not relaxed, at least calm beneath his hands, and responding as he wanted.

Mycroft circled her again, standing between her and the table now, and leaned down to take her hands from the arms of the chair. “Come with me, my very, very good girl,” he said, and with a sound of obvious relief she allowed him to lead her from the room.

He took her to the office, where he handed her _A Wrinkle in Time_ and pulled her onto the settee, head on his thigh, for an hour of reading and petting. He had plenty of documents to work though today, but he quickly realized that he was so distracted by his project that he was only taking in information at ninety percent of his peak efficiency. His mind kept wandering back to the question of how she would respond if he pushed her as hard as he wanted to, and it derailed his analyses time and again.

No matter. This part was simply passing time anyway, letting her nervous system unclench. She surely knew there was more to come, but he could feel her giving in to the now-familiar routine, to his soothing hands in her hair and on her body.

At eleven o’clock he put his files aside and she followed suit with her novel without being prompted. She was immediately anxious again, but that was to be expected as he took her back to the sitting room where the Spyderco still awaited.

She went to her chair and arranged herself again as he had before, taking a deep breath and looking up at him. He smiled approvingly as he leaned over and picked up the knife.

The moment it was in his hands her eyes were locked on it again. Mycroft unfolded the blade, and her whole body jerked at the loud click of the locking mechanism. He placed it back on the table.

She stared at it, tears leaking slowly down her cheeks now. She chewed her bottom lip, having to work much harder to avoid starting the process of hitching for air that was sure to push her into a panic attack. He moved to her quickly, getting his hands on her to help her ground herself again.

This time she sagged right away when he touched her. Clever girl, clearly aware of what came next and this time desperate for the eventual relief that she knew that he could bring to her if she opened up to it.

It still took a great deal of time, care and effort, even now that she understood what was expected. On the one hand she’d already experienced the first round of desensitization; on the other, the exposure of the blade clearly terrified her. It took Mycroft almost an hour and a half to get her where he wanted her this time, even with her active cooperation and desperation for it to work.

They took another break then, a light lunch that she struggled to get down. He was gratified when he didn’t even need to state that he wanted her to finish it… not only did she understand how short her leash was today, but he knew that she was starting to understand that she wanted it that way if she was going to get through the rest of the process. So she chewed and swallowed grimly, and drank the half glass of wine that he gave her without protest.

She was relieved when he took her to the office for another hour before returning to the sitting room, though this time she opted to doze on his lap instead of picking up her novel. He was aware that she wasn’t really asleep, but she seemed to be conserving energy, actively taking the break before whatever he intended to do next.

This time when he put his folders aside she sobbed softly, but she did her best to gather her composure as she followed him obediently from the office. When she settled into her chair he positioned himself behind her immediately, hands on her shoulders, squeezing lightly.

“What comes next, pet?”

She exhaled, long and shuddering, her fingers tightening on the arms of the chair.

“You’re going to pick it up, Daddy?”

“Yes. And then…?”

A hitch. Another hitch. Then a slower, controlled breath.

“I don’t think I can do this, Daddy. I’m _sorry_ , god, I’m _sorry_.” She sobbed in despair.

Quite the contrary, though, he’d expected a crisis of faith at some point. He brushed her hair forward over her shoulders, exposing her nape, then leaned forward. His teeth closed on the back of her neck as his hands found her wrists and held them firmly against the arms of the chair.

She froze, her breath suspended within her body, a bone-deep vibration running through her. Mycroft bit down firmly, squeezing her wrists hard enough to grind the bones against each other.

“Unhhhg…” was roughly the sound she made, overcome by the sudden, unanticipated onslaught of moderate pain from three quarters at once. He couldn’t know whether her eyes remained on the knife or not, but he certainly felt the shudders running through her. Harder he bit, and harder he squeezed, and he was rewarded when she pushed back into the chair, into him and more pain.

“ _Daddy_.” She could barely get the word out. She was twisting her wrists within his grip, her head fallen forward. She certainly wasn't looking at the knife now.

Mycroft released her neck but not her wrists, and put his lips near her ear. “You can do whatever I tell you to do, Willow.”

 _There_ , a hard shudder. She was softer, now. Trembling, yes, but _soft..._ in his hands, between his teeth. He could taste her compliance, her sweet masochism on his tongue, on his teeth, on the roof of his mouth.

He released her wrists and came around in front of her, looking down at her from his height. She looked up through tears clinging to her lashes, her mouth slightly agape. He knew that the time for the methodical approach had passed. She needed more.

Mycroft slid one foot back, pushing the table where the knife still waited further away, so that he had room to squat down on his heels before her. His body now obscured her view of that which she feared. Instead, he filled her field of vision himself. He kept his expression calm and composed, though he knew that his eyes, which more than one lover of his youth had described as chilly, would be glittering with the intensity of his attention.

He savored the apprehension in her expression with regards to what he was about to demand of her, and the way that her eyes, held by him, pleaded for his help, for his stability and his strength and his cunning, careful manipulation.

Mycroft smiled, wanting her to see how pleased he was with her. “You are my very good girl, and you can do anything that I tell you to. Isn’t that right, sweetheart?”

He could see the conflict inside of her, but with him in front of her, overwhelming her, there was only one way forward for her. “Yes, Daddy,” she answered, her voice cracking with emotion.

“Good. But because it’s my job to take care of you, I’m going to help you do what I’m telling you to. Would you like some help, pet?”

“ _Yes, Daddy._ ”

“I thought you would.”

Mycroft stood and moved away, letting her see the knife again. He fetched the soft silk rope he’d procured, already pre-cut to the various lengths he required. When he came back to her with it in his hands, he saw the relief course through her body.

“Oh god, _thank you, Daddy_ ,” she whispered brokenly.

Mycroft took his time binding her, knowing how the process would soothe her back down before the next step. Wrists and elbows, first, to the arms of the heavy chair, then knees and ankles to its legs. He bound her to the high back at her waist, another set of ropes under her armpits, crossing over her sternum and shoulders. He used several loops at each point, immobilizing her thoroughly without cutting off circulation.

When the job was done he stood back and regarded her. She’d eventually closed her eyes while he worked, letting her head sag forward again as she relaxed into the bondage.

He stood back and admired his handiwork -- each knot laying flat, in the orientation that he’d intended, loops all neatly aligned. Mycroft did appreciate the details. Willow, who loved both control and pain, looked back at him with obvious gratitude on her face.

“Are you ready?” Obviously, she was not ready, and would never be ready, but making her say it would force a sense of participation in the process.

“Yes, Daddy,” she lied, passingly well, though the tightness around her eyes betrayed her.

Mycroft picked up the knife, testing its weight and balance in his hand. He’d already familiarized himself with it thoroughly, but the display was for her benefit. For all that Mycroft had come to despise James Moriarty -- and his loathing ran stronger and deeper than ever after the last month -- the maniac had impeccable taste in both suits and weapons. The Spyderco was only a little larger than the average pocketknife, nothing ostentatious, but the feel of the cool shaped metal handle in Mycroft’s palm, the wicked but not vulgar curve to the blade… it was a work of art, a beautiful knife, but one that was made to be used, not admired. It was _ruthless_.

And Moriarty had used his ruthlessly, to take her apart. Mycroft was about to use it to carve her into something better, stronger.

He scooted the little table forward and sat down on it before her. She was sweating lightly in the cool room, her eyes flickering between the knife and Mycroft’s face.

“First, over fabric, not skin. This will not change without warning. Do you understand, Willow?”

She took a long, shuddering breath. “Yes, Daddy.”

Mycroft lowered the tip of the blade to the front of her thigh, over the silk of the dress. He’d expected her to tense or jerk when she felt the blade make contact, but she didn’t. There was a faint twitch in the muscle of her thigh, clearly involuntary. She was inhaling, slowly, and she didn’t gasp either. Just the blade, coming into contact lightly, and tracing a line toward her knee.

He looked up at her. Her eyes were fixed on his face, not on the knife. Her teeth dug into her lower lip, which was trembling, and she swallowed hard.

Mycroft’s heart lurched in his chest, sudden and unexpected. He knew he was seeing a form of controlled dissociation, her focus on him instead of the object in his hand, and that he would have to disrupt it before they were done, and yet… her attachment to him, her trust in his control, her desire for pain at his hands, were all stronger than her fear of the knife that Moriarty had used to cut her apart. Suddenly, it was _Mycroft_ who could barely breathe, and had to focus to keep the blade still where it had come to rest.

Through decades of cultivated habit, Mycroft’s brilliant mind had begun concealing his reactions before he fully realized what was happening. She didn’t need to see how her trust had just hit him like a punch to the gut. This moment, this process wasn’t supposed to be about him, but her. They were frozen like that, staring at each other, the tip of the blade resting about six inches above her left knee.

After a moment, he lifted both his brow and the blade. He’d managed to get a hold of himself, he thought without her noticing that anything was amiss.

“Not so very frightening, dear? Hm, what about this?”

He placed it against her sternum, between her small breasts, just below the ropes that pressed back on her collarbones and held her upper body against the chair. This time she sucked in a hard breath just before the sharp tip made contact, as if to pull away. But she didn’t glance downward even for a moment, her eyes still on him instead. Out of his peripheral vision he saw her fingers tighten on the arms of the chair until they were white, and he half-heard, half-felt her heart hammering wildly in her chest. She was far from calm, but she was holding herself just this side of panic by focusing on him.

So much for controlling the responses of his own body. Mycroft shifted uncomfortably… he had plausible deniability as long as he sat like this, but there was no way to stand up without presenting her with obvious evidence that he liked what he was doing very, very much.

He trailed the knife downward, toward her navel, and she held very still. He didn’t need to look down… he’d ensured that the blade was very sharp, a firm believer that dull blades only encouraged careless handlers, but the silk of the dress was thick enough that he wasn’t going to cut it, or her, without a slight increase in pressure.

Her eyes were so wide now that he could see the whites all the way around her irises, and he wondered if she was going to chew through her lip, but when he pressed in just a bit over her navel, making sure that she could feel the tip and not just the edge, she responded with a small, tight nod of encouragement.

She took a deep breath. “You can… you can touch my skin. I can handle it, Daddy, I promise.”

He felt the corner of his mouth lift in appreciation. He hadn’t meant to let the reaction through his filters, but on second thought she had probably earned it. She was surprising him. Surprising _him_ , Mycroft Holmes. A slip of a girl, beaten, traumatized… and moving faster than he’d been prepared for.

It made him want to push her even harder, even faster.

It made him want to know just _how_ hard and fast he could push her.

It made him wonder what would happen if he pushed her harder and faster than _that_.

“As a matter of fact, I _would_ like to touch your skin with this knife. But I want to know, do you _want_ to feel the blade in my hand, sweetheart?”

She blanched. It was a cruel question, deliberately so. The obvious answer was ‘no.’ Of course she didn’t. Of course she never would. Except that he’d phrased the question carefully, reminding her that the knife that she hated was in _his_ hand now, and she _liked_ what he did to her with his hands.

“Yes, Daddy,” she answered, her voice tight with effort.  She was lying, but she was lying in the way that masochists did when you had them fully, inescapably ensnared. She didn’t want to feel the blade, not in the least. What she _wanted_ , however, was for Mycroft to make her feel it anyway.

He hadn’t expected it to go this way. He’d been prepared for a pure desensitization exercise, and he’d known how tricky it would be and therefore how rewarding for him, but this?

This was _sex_.

And his body knew it, no matter how much he disapproved of her age. He was rock hard. He couldn’t remember the last time his body had been screaming at him for attention, for release, like this. Adolescence, probably, when his hormones had been an absolute torment to the reason-loving young man that he’d been.

She was watching him, waiting fearfully. He was off-balance, not reacting as quickly as usual, derailed by her unexpected overtures and the sheer, forceful want that they were eliciting.

Mycroft put his left hand on her knee, pushing the fabric of her dress upward. There was no pretending that the familiar motion was anything other than the prelude to a seduction, not anything that he ought to be doing to a girl her age, but then he supposed no one else would think that he ought to have been biting her for the last four weeks either.

She inhaled, bracing herself. He laid the edge of the blade on her and drew a smooth, curving line up the front of her thigh, toward her body.

Her shaking within her bonds was violent now, her erratic panting barely within her control. She was terrified out of her mind. And yet, she moaned, a moan of completely undeniable pleasure.

He drew a half-circle, brought the tip of the blade down again. He glanced down for just a second to check how her skin took the pressure… the faintest pink line marked its track, not raised at all. Her pale skin was sensitive, but not overly so. He was in no danger of breaking his promise not to cut her.

He very much wanted to break that promise.

“Daddy.” Her voice was small, breathless, and to his great astonishment he felt her try to press her thigh up toward the blade. The elaborate bondage permitted her to do no such thing, but he could read it in her muscles and tendons.

“Willow.” He also spoke softly, strangely aware of the heavy, expectant silence in the room. The thick velvet curtains and reinforced windows completely muffled the noise of the grey London afternoon outside, and he could hear his blood pounding in his veins. He could hear both of them breathing, and if he listened very closely he could hear the faint scratch of steel moving over epidermis.

A line. A loop. A curve, this one tracing from the front of her thigh downward on the outside of her body. Another line, across her quad, and the tip of the knife was sliding over thinner skin, her _inner_ thigh.

He should be doing no such thing. But she was swallowing repeatedly now, and he could read from the bite of the rope into her ribs that her back wanted to arch, was trying to arch. Every once in a while a soft sob escaped from between her lips. Her eyelids fluttered, but she didn’t try to close them, obedient to his clear desire to hold her gaze.

Mycroft’s tongue touched his bottom lip. He glanced down again to confirm his mental map of her topography, then used the tip of the knife to push her dress further up her thighs. It covered only an inch beyond her knickers now, the fabric falling in a smooth drape between her spread, bound legs. He knew full well that the panel of fabric that covered her perineum was exposed to the room even if he couldn’t discern it from this angle.

Her scent was clear in the air. Her nipples were hard beneath the silk bodice of the dress. Her face was flushed with both fear and desire.

He knew he should say something, break the spell. Something to put the focus back on her, back on the desensitization, back on the fact that this was intended to be helping her, not gratifying him.

He didn’t. He slid the tip of the knife under the edge of her skirt, right up to the hem of her knickers, then followed it down into the hollow of tendons on the inside of her thigh where it met her groin. It was a place he had no business being. She hated and liked it so much that her head fell back with a thump and she could no longer keep her eyes open, a long groan squeezing past her tight throat.

Mycroft trailed the knife across the taut fabric of her knickers to her other inner thigh. She couldn’t press forward more than a millimeter, but it was enough for the point of the knife to dimple the fabric, to tug it in its path.

It was the same knife that had mutilated her flesh, within a hair’s breadth of the labia that had been carved into. And she was pushing toward it, proving beyond any question that she was absolutely eroticizing her terror.

Mycroft had to pause a moment to gather himself.

He realized with a flash of incredible shame and arousal that he had to stop thinking about the disfigured flesh beneath her knickers or he was going to cream his pants like a boy. Controlling his breathing through great effort, he looked up -- her head was still back, her eyes closed, and a novel of mingled fear and pleasure was written in every line of her face. She still had no idea how strongly she was affecting him, how off-track he had gotten.

Mycroft knew, though. Nothing happening in his brain or body was supposed to be happening, and he hadn’t planned adequately for appropriate self-management. Concentrating, he knew he needed to move the knife somewhere safer, so he laid its tip on her chest again, tracing a line on the expanse of white skin below the silk rope and above the deep scoop neckline of her dress. Surely, surely he would be able to keep his traitorous desires in check if he just kept the damned knife above her waist and refused to think about her disfigured genitals and all the ways that he could fix them to his liking.

The tip moved lower, tracing the neckline of her dress, outlining the shape of the exposed skin. Her breathing picked up further as the knife pushed up over the subtle swell of the tops of her breasts. Oh, how she wanted to move, to bring the threat and the danger closer to the parts of her that were tight with wanting.

Again he checked her face. This time she was peeking up at him, and the look in her eyes made him realize abruptly that he must have stopped guarding his own expression when she was offline and he was distracted.

“You _want_ to cut me, Daddy,” she said, and while her voice was still had the quake of her fear in it, it held another note as well… she wasn’t really asking him a question. She knew that what she said was true, and some small, not-yet-mature part of her was recognizing the power that it gave her over him with something like… wonder.

She knew that he wanted to cut her, and she knew that he believed that he shouldn’t do it.

Mycroft was paralyzed for several seconds, unsure what to do next. She gave him a small, shaky smile, and took a deep breath.

“ _Please_ , Daddy. Do it. _Cut me._ I bled for him, so much. I don’t want to have bled for him, but never for you. It’s not _right_.”

Mycroft gave a soft, incredulous laugh and sat back, letting the knife drop to his knee.

But she saw her advantage, and pressed it. Not expertly, perhaps, but effectively all the same. “If you have to make me do this, at least give me this,” she argued, pulling at the ropes so that they bit into her skin. “Blood, Daddy. You want to see it. I think you want to _taste_ it.”

Mycroft had prided himself on his flexible and practical morality ever since he’d been a boy. But this? This was absolutely _wrong_.

And he just didn’t care any more.

He raised the knife and, with a small rotation of the blade, caught the neckline of her dress precisely in the middle. A flick of his wrist and the silk gave way… another turn, another snag, a different motion, and he sliced her dress cleanly halfway to her navel. The two panels fell away, exposing her breasts.

Mycroft had seen every part of her body many times in the course of cleaning her and supervising her medical care, and her horrific history meant that she thought nothing of it the way a normal girl would. But the fall of her sliced garment, framing her small, high breasts beneath the ropes wrapped just above them, was absolutely and undeniably pornographic, and Mycroft felt his cock twitch in his pants at the sight.

She was still frightened, deeply frightened, but her desire had outstripped it now. He realized belatedly that whatever she had done inside of her mind to try to cope with Mycroft’s little exercise, she had done far too well. He took in the desperation in her eyes, the heaving of her breasts, and realized with dismay that he felt as badly undone as she looked.

He raised the knife again, to her right breast. Placed the tip just above her tight pink nipple.

She strained forward toward it, ineffectively. If he’d done nothing else wise today, at least the thorough and careful bondage had turned out to be an excellent idea. He was afraid that otherwise he’d be fucking her in a _pool_ of blood within the next ten minutes, his frayed and questionable morality be damned to hell.

He pressed in, incrementally, watching her face. She gasped, then moaned.

She liked it.

Mycroft pushed the blade sideways slowly, feeling the resistance from her epidermis. He was gauging the depth carefully, and the skin just _barely_ parted, a fine red line, with tiny beads of blood welling up slowly like a line of shining red pearls.

Her eyes flickered closed and open again. “ _Thank you. Thank you. Thank you._ ” It was half under her breath, and he wasn’t sure if she was aware that she was saying it.

He breathed slowly, moving the blade to the other side, placing it symmetrically to the first cut so she would be sure that the second one was coming.

“ _Thank you Daddy,_ ” she murmured hoarsely before he’d even started. “Deeper this time; make it _hurt_.”

He cut her again, deeper.

He wasn’t watching her face anymore, as for the moment he didn’t care about her reaction. Instead his eyes followed the gleaming metal parting pale skin, and this time he saw the sides of the laceration separate immediately, the deep red fluid welling up and beginning to drip down her breast, over her hard nipple.

The sounds she was making were obscene. The sight of her blood, running in rivulets over her puckered areola, tracking around the peaked nub of flesh in its center, made him feel light-headed with arousal. Mycroft leaned forward and took her nipple into his mouth, first sucking and licking the blood from her flesh, then taking it between his teeth and tugging. In response, she thrashed in her bonds so hard that she actually managed to rattle the legs of the heavy chair on Mycroft’s floor.

The sounds coming from her throat deepened and intensified, and he knew exactly what they meant. Every other time that she’d orgasmed with him, it had been her own fingers sliding between what remained of her labia, her own touch on her scarred clitoris bringing her off. Tonight he’d tied her to a chair.

Mycroft slid his left hand between her thighs, cupping her through the thin fabric of her knickers. He rocked his palm side-to-side briefly, coaxing her labia open, ensuring that the pressure from his palm would find the nub of flesh tucked between them. Her knickers were completely sodden, and his palm was slick as he pressed it between her legs, his teeth and tongue still worrying her bloodied nipple.

Her orgasm was cataclysmic. He’d held her in his arms as she came undone, his teeth buried in her skin or his thumb pressed deep into a vulnerable cluster of nerves, ten times in the last month, but he hadn’t seen anything like _this_. She’d always whimpered through them, but tonight every shred of self-awareness was gone and she started by keening “Daddy” in a piercing cry that would have made clear to everyone in a kilometre’s radius what was happening if Mycroft’s flat hadn’t been sound-proofed. This devolved immediately into broken, breathless sobbing that persisted through at least two and probably three peaks that Mycroft managed to wring from her with the encouragement of his wrist and palm.

He sat back again, breathing hard, and watched her coming down slowly, her chest hitching, her head turning side to side. His cock ached badly, every fiber of his traitorous body telling him that after that, the only thing that he could possible do was to _take_ her.

He tried desperately to remind himself that she was his ward, his responsibility. That he was supposed to be taking care of her.

And yet, at the moment, it felt like he _was_.

His blood was pounding in his ears, and everything in the flat seemed to be in bizarre, high relief. The sound of her slowing panting was absorbed by the matte walls and heavy drapes, the way that her pale skin disappeared into curved purple shadow in the dim light, the wet red gleam of smeared blood on her pearly nipples, the shine of her eyes, watching him now.

“Do it,” she said, her voice hoarse and barely audible.

Mycroft blinked, slowly. “Do -- do what?” He sounded uncertain to his own ears. It was not a sound that he was used to.

The girl smiled, pulling against the ropes at her wrists, wriggling her shoulders, her breasts shifting in the light. “Do it,” she said again, firmer this time.

He couldn’t, he _wouldn’t_ fuck her. Thank god he’d bound her so that it was impossible without untying her, ensuring time for sanity to reassert itself if he tried anything so beyond the pale.

But then his hand was moving, and he didn’t know what he meant to do. The knife, trailing up her thigh, but he didn’t open the skin. He slipped the tip of the blade beneath the hem of her knickers and sliced the fabric on one side, then the other.

She watched him, eyes dark with desire. Her orgasm, fantastic as it had been, had not finished it for her. He knew why.

She could see that _he_ wanted more.

Mycroft tugged the fabric of her knickers free. The drape of the hem of her dress still left her in shadow, but the sharp blade parted her dress the rest of the way down the front, and while he had to work around the ropes at her waist, it wasn’t difficult to free the fabric and push it aside once he’d split it.

Finally he’d fully exposing the damaged labia between her bound-apart thighs. He’d had a reasonably detailed idea of what he would find there, having been present for John’s examinations and having washed her himself during her first few days with him, but he’d certainly had no reason (no excuse) to look this closely.

A strange calm had come over him as he’d accepted that he was going this much further than he’d meant to. This much further than he should.

She seemed to comprehend and respond to his shift in mood. It was unreal, given the loud pumping of blood and beating of hearts that he knew was happening in both of their bodies, but there was something both sacred and profane in the way that they were ignoring the boundaries of decency and plunging headlong into blood and sex. Something about it left the very air charged, perhaps with the knowledge that if anyone else could see them, the spell would be shattered, the secrecy of the -- the unintended, unspoken _pact_ between them fractured.

Mycroft breathed evenly, cataloguing the damage that Moriarty had done.

“ _Do it_ , Daddy,” she said again. She didn’t sound hoarse, and she didn’t sound like a little girl. A distant part of him noted with astonishment that she was not merely encouraging him, not merely giving him permission, but almost… _ordering_ him.

Mycroft couldn’t remember the last time that someone other than his mother had given him an order.

The knife. He was still holding the knife that he’d used to strip her naked, the tattered remains of a very expensive silk frock tangled in the ropes around her. The knife identical to the one that had mutilated her.

Mycroft put the tip of the knife above the V where her labia met, then traced it down one side, over both scarred and unscarred flesh, outlining both damaged and intact anatomy with a careful hand. Down the other side.

Into her inner labia, flowing with slick fluids.

Around the tattered edge of her clitoral hood, the edge of the blade just scraping over the nub itself.

Down, lower, tracing the opening that led to her womb. Ridges of scar tissue, deep divots where flesh was missing.

She was staring at him. Her body was tense from head to toe in her bonds, her breathing tight, but nothing in her body said _panic_ , just intense, overpowering tension. He could still read and smell her fear, but it was not at the forefront, not anymore. She was in no danger of losing control of herself; she was simply desperate for him to continue.

Mycroft drew a breath, aware that he meant to speak, unsure of what was about to come out of his mouth. It should have alarmed him -- everything about the way that this day had spun out of his control should have alarmed him -- but it didn’t.

“It’s… troubling, for me, that what he did to you, the state that he left you in, makes it impossible not to meditate on one of my own most disturbing desires.” His voice was thoughtful. The strange contrast between tranquility and arousal was, if anything, becoming more intense.

She didn’t say anything, just continued to watch him. She'd certainly never heard him use this... confessional tone before. Perhaps she sensed that speaking might spook him. Perhaps that was giving the girl too much credit. He wasn't sure any more.

Steel tracing flesh. He didn’t think she was even afraid of the knife any more. Which was good, as he could no longer remember why he’d started all this and what he’d meant to accomplish with it.

“To… remake a woman, here,” he said softly. “Not the way he did to you. This is butchery, utterly uncouth. It should have been... elegant.”

He didn’t know if she knew what he meant, but she nodded as if she did, her eyes bright as she hung on his words.

“Elegant,” he repeated. “Smooth. Labia, not mangled, but _gone_. All of this --” the tip of the blade pressed into her clitoral hood, “ _gone_. Nothing to hide you. Nothing to obscure you. Just this here, a tidy, exposed little button to trigger your pleasure should I chose to, and here, a slick, unprotected hole to fill or leave empty as I like. What more than those two things should a woman really need in my hands?”

He looked up at her face, and was stunned to see her expression. It was _tender_. He could still read her desire, of course, but more than that, she looked like a young girl in love.

His chest and throat tightened, and he couldn’t breathe.

She spoke, carefully, like _she_ was worried about frightening _him_. “You said, when you brought me here, that I would need to be -- reconstructed. That I would need surgery, after I healed.”

He nodded. “Yes. You will.”

“And you’ll be the one in charge of it, when it happens, won’t you, Daddy? You’ll decide who will do it, and you’ll tell them what the outcome should be?”

Mycroft closed his eyes. He held up a hand to stop the flow of her words.

It was a long moment before he could look at her, and when he did, he knew that he was lost to whatever was about to happen.

“Whatever it is, _do it_ , Daddy. _Please_.”

Mycroft didn’t know if she knew what she wanted him to do, and he didn’t know what he intended to do. But a moment later he found himself on one knee before her, and he felt the satisfying resistance of soft flesh parting under fine steel, a sensation like nothing else on earth.

Three centimetres, the length of the laceration that he made. Above her labia, above her clit, in the soft, relatively unmarred flesh of her mons. Deeper, this one, so that blood flowed freely down, into her slit, between her labia, and over her clitoris.

She groaned softly as he did it, her thighs trembling. He watched the ruby fluid mingle into the slickness that already anointed her, and he knew what he meant to do -- what she’d been _begging_ him to do -- only a second before he was doing it.

Mycroft leaned in and put his mouth on her. The piercing flavors of copper and salt exploded on his tongue and went straight to his cock, making it throb relentlessly. He could feel every scar, every divot in startling detail, and with the very tip of his tongue he coaxed out the nub nestled in and hiding shyly as best it could under the portion of her clitoral hood that remained to her, using a technique he’d not practiced in... well, a long time. He declined to calculate how long.

She came again, in his mouth this time, his tongue laving at her freely, licking up every ounce of fluid greedily, sucking her clean as if there would be a white glove test afterwards. Mycroft _also_ orgasmed, in his expensive Saville Row pants, like a boy. He had no idea what sounds he might have made, no idea what he was doing as lights flashed behind his closed eyelids and waves of thought-obliterating pleasure wracked his unprepared body. He didn’t know where the knife was, didn’t know if there was any part of his brain still in charge of what he was doing, didn’t know if he was blowing every circuit in his mental machinery for good, didn’t know if what was happening was right or wrong. He just… _came_ , so hard that for a second a mental klaxon sounded somewhere far away that he distantly knew meant that he was in danger of passing out.

He came, with the blood and vaginal fluids of a traumatized girl on his tongue, with her legs trying to wrap themselves over his shoulders but restrained by the ropes he’d put on her. She was keening, and he heard the thump of wood against carpet again as she threw her weight. He’d dropped the knife, he realized, and his fingers were digging into the tops of her thighs, holding her beneath his still-seeking mouth. There was still a pulsing low in his groin, subsiding slowly. His brain was nothing but cobwebs and gelatin, but his body was ringing clear as a bell in the wake of the stunning pleasure.

He stilled, as she did beneath his hands and mouth.

The moment stretched out, both of their bodies humming, the frequency dropping hertz by hertz. He turned his head slightly, letting it rest on her lap, his hands releasing their grip on her thighs and resting there lightly instead. His legs ached from his uncomfortable position, but reality was knocking at the door and demanding re-entrance and he knew that there would be no keeping it out once either of them moved.

She was relaxed beneath him now, but in her immobile state there was little to read on her until he was ready to look up at her expression. She was quiet, so not crying, or not crying hard. She was soft.

He had been soft, for a moment, but no longer. Now he was thinking -- it was hard, muddy, but he couldn’t stop it from happening. The strange spell of the day had clearly disturbed his clarity of mind, warping his perception and judgment, and then orgasm had blown it all entirely out the window. But now his body was resolving, his pants were uncomfortably sticky, and he’d done a whole host of things that were well beyond the pale and not in any way what he had planned for.

Now that he could think -- unfortunately so -- he remembered exactly when and where the knife had fallen from his fingers. He reached down and picked it up without looking, then sat back on his heels in spite of the protests of his thighs and lower back.

“Daddy --”

“No, Willow. Please don’t say anything.”

He didn’t look up at her as he set to work, cutting through each rope that held her with brisk efficiency. Each ankle, each knee. Her wrists, and her elbows. He sliced through the rope at his waist, and due to his angle he couldn’t avoid her expression as he focused on cutting the rope that ran under her arms and over her shoulders.

She looked worried.

“Daddy.”

“I said _don’t_ ,” he snapped, regretting the sharpness -- not now, not at her, not right now -- but not knowing how else to ensure that she didn’t say another word. The last rope was cut, and she would be able to free herself with minimal effort. The ones on her legs fell away easily, but the deep ligature marks and the accompanying bruising were already clear. They wouldn’t have been so severe but for all her pulling, but they were, and the stab of guilt cut through the last of the biological haze that pervaded his brain.

He had to leave. He had to get away from her. He was frightened, of himself, of her, of the ligature marks pressed into her limbs, of the blood smeared on her skin, of the look on her face, of the undeniable youth of her barely-developed breasts, of her masochism, of her adoration, of her mutilated body, of what it was all bringing out in him.

He turned and left the room, not looking back. He knew she would be bereft -- he was not too far gone to understand that she didn’t grasp the enormous wrongness of what he had done -- and he knew that he was wronging her again, further, after spending all of that time cultivating her dependence and attachment to him. But he couldn’t do anything else.

He snatched his phone and wallet with shaking hands and fled the flat, well aware that his pants were filled with ejaculate and ignoring the shame and discomfort that the stickiness provoked through force of will. He had other suits at the Club. At the office. At anywhere that wasn’t his flat, anywhere that wasn’t filled with the girl he’d stolen and groomed and abused and forced to love him.

He had to squint to focus well enough to press the correct auto-dial. Sherlock didn’t pick up, so he thumbed his way reluctantly into text messages and sent one to both Sherlock and John -- _Pick up NOW please._

He called again, and heard Sherlock’s voice. “Mycroft?”

“I need you at the flat. Willow needs supervision; take John with you. _Now_ , please, Sherlock. She’s there alone and she oughtn’t be.”

“Brother --” Sherlock hesitated, analyzing what he could from Mycroft’s tone, then continued. “What did you _do_ _?”_

Mycroft hung up, knowing that would communicate more clearly than any words he could have used.


	7. Shame Spiral

Mycroft sat alone in his office in the deserted Diogenes Club.

He’d not even brought his laptop with him when he fled his flat, though there were certainly stacks of documents to which he could and should be giving his attention. Instead a half-consumed brandy waited by his elbow -- unfortunately not his first -- and he sat with his head in his hands, wondering what the hell he had allowed to happen.

He was not a child. Hell, he’d barely been a child back when he’d _actually_ been a child. He’d neglected his needs in the urgency of his work, for sure, a state of affairs about which his perceptive PA had been dropping unwelcome hints for years now. After nearly four decades of hammering home to Sherlock that attachment was a weakness, Mycroft had truly believed that it was simply his sexual needs, the biological needs of his regrettably biological body, that he was neglecting, and that no harm would come of it.

He would have laughed at himself, were he still the kind of man who laughed.

Willow _was_ a child. A _literal_ child. Brighter than average by normal standards, but Mycroft’s personal standards were far from normal. Pretty, in a just-ripening way that he knew that most men had a very particular response to, but that had never mattered to him before. Warped by her horrific experiences of the world -- far more warped than Mycroft had been by the early and brutal heartbreak that convinced him to forego romantic endeavors altogether -- and yet she was still able, somehow, to learn to trust again, and to trust _him_ , of all people. He’d carefully calculated and cultivated exactly that, and yet somehow it still stunned him to discover what it felt like to be on the receiving end of it.

Intoxicating. Heady. Fascinating in a way that manipulating heads of state used to be fascinating, but often wasn’t anymore. The truth was, he thought about her constantly when he wasn’t with her… what she might be doing and if she was recovering as efficiently as possible, how her mental and physical education was progressing and how he intended to handle it going forward, exactly how her trauma had changed her psyche and how he could leverage those distortions into what he wanted her to become in the future.

He thought about the things that he wanted to do to her for his own gratification. Manipulating her sexual attachment to him in a way that Moriarty had never truly achieved, so that the idea of being touched by anyone else without his direction became repulsive to her. Exploring the limits of her masochism, how much pain he could make her enjoy, as well as how far he could push her beyond that without compromising her attachment to him. Remaking her mutilated body to his own specifications. Making her healthy and happy with all of the above. Keeping her forever.

Why hadn’t he seen any of this coming? That was perhaps the worst blow of all. Not desiring her, not becoming attached to her, but his utter oblivion to what was happening until he found himself in the middle of an intended desensitization exercise with a knife in his hand and her blood and fluids on his lips, his favorite wool trousers soiled by ejaculate.

_What hadn’t he seen it coming?_

“Love blinds us all, brother mine,” said Sherlock.

Mycroft startled badly, nearly knocking over his drink, and shot halfway out of his chair before fully processing what had occurred. Sherlock’s smirk as he strolled across the office and dropped lazily into one of the chairs was infuriating.

It was obvious, but in his befuddlement he heard himself saying the words anyway. “You should have set off --” 

“-- the alarms? Yes, well. Not tonight, Mycroft.”

Mycroft sat again, rubbing his palm over his face. “Sherlock, you should be with --”

“Bollocks," Sherlock interrupted him again. "She’s with John, who’s much more comforting than I am. I’m of greater help to her here, obviously.”

Mycroft frowned. “You’re the last person from whom I need a pep talk, Sherlock.”

Sherlock raised a brow. “Quite the contrary, I’m _exactly_ the person from whom you need a pep talk. Who else is qualified?”

“That’s not what I mean. I don’t need one at all.”

“Of course you do. Otherwise you’re going to talk yourself out of going home to the mess you’ve made.”

Mycroft felt faint color rise on the back of his neck.

“I think there’s ample evidence that my judgment has been unsound in the matter. Andrea --”

“-- might have done a fine job if you’d handed the girl over at the outset, but is no longer what she needs, Mycroft. You know that. You’ve _ensured_ that.”

Mycroft sat back and crossed his arms. “What do you care, brother? This is hardly the sort of matter that merits your attention.” He was going on the offensive to distract Sherlock, and they would both know it, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t work.

But Sherlock was unruffled. “Seven times,” he said mildly.

Seven? Did he mean -- ?

“Seven times,” Sherlock continued at Mycroft’s raised brow, “that you have found me and saved my heroin-addled life in my hours of need, whether I wanted you to or not.”

“That was different.”

“No.” Sherlock let the word hang in the air between them.

Mycroft cleared his throat. “Sherlock. I know that neither of us has ever been accused of being over-burdened by conscience, but what I did today was horrific. Surely even you can see that?”

“This, from a man who has killed people in cold blood. Some of whom had families, I’m sure, families who wept for them. How much sleep have you lost over that?”

Mycroft blinked. Sherlock had never before indicated that he had surmised that. “I was a field agent, doing my duty in order to prove myself. Every one of those ops had an appropriate justification.”

“ _This_ had an appropriate justification.”

“Oh really? What was that?”

“You both enjoyed it, until you lost your head and _bolted_ on the girl.”

Mycroft blinked, stunned to hear such sentiment come out of Sherlock’s mouth.

“I -- I wasn’t sure what I was going to do next,” he heard himself confessing, surprisingly.

“You were going to take her to your bed, where you both should have slept soundly through the night if not for this ridiculous and unnecessary crisis of conscience that you're manufacturing.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“How’s your lifelong insomnia been since you brought Willow home?” Sherlock’s face made clear that he knew the answer.

“Better, obviously, but that doesn’t mean --”

“You should just get on with it and have sex with her, too. John says that she menstruates.”

“That’s hardly --”

“Throughout human history, menses has been the signifier of sexual maturity in young women. Age of consent laws are arbitrary expressions of silly morality that ought not apply to anyone with a functioning brain. And her circumstances are hardly normal anyway; it would honestly do her good.”

 _“Stop interrupting me, Sherlock.”_ Really, Mycroft didn’t know what had gotten into his younger brother. He was acting as out of character as, well, Mycroft himself.

Sherlock smirked again, and Mycroft felt the urge to wipe it off his face. It was unfortunate that he was in no physical or mental state to achieve that end at the moment.

Mycroft took a deep breath and attempted to collect himself and his thoughts. “Sherlock, you have always made clear that this is absolutely not your area. I fear your... _advice_ does not come with a great deal of credibility attached to it.”

“Just because I’m not interested in such matters myself doesn’t mean that my perception is unsound. Yours, on the other hand, clearly is. You haven’t asked about Willow.”

Mycroft felt his jaw tighten. Sherlock was, of course, correct, but Mycroft couldn’t bring himself to do it. He raised his eyebrows expectantly, and was relieved when his brother took pity on him.

“She’s terrified that you’re not coming back, My. Moriarty tortured her for years, and she’s had exactly one month of safety in her life, and it was all under your hand. And you took her to the absolute edge of what she could do for you and then you abandoned her.”

Well, honestly, it didn’t sound very good when Sherlock put it like that.

There was no way around a full confession, not if Sherlock was going to understand why Mycroft had had to do what he’d done in spite of the consequences. “I -- I cut her, Sherlock. I hadn’t planned to; the goal was to desensitize her to blades, not to make her phobia worse. I _cut_ her, and I --”

Sherlock waved a hand, cutting him off. “Obvious. What on earth makes you assume that you worsened her phobia?”

“I… _cut_ her.”

“Yes, and then you abandoned her, so that the knife was all that she had left of what you’d just done to her. When John and I got to your flat, she was clinging to it as she sobbed and has absolutely refused to relinquish it. While your execution may have gone somewhat afield, I’m quite sure that you achieved your original goal.”

Mycroft stared at his brother, taking this in.

_Wrong again, Holmes. Well done, you._

Was he a _moron?_ Did he have a _brain tumor?_ When had Mycroft Holmes become _stupid?_

“When you came in your pants, I’d say,” Sherlock said smugly. “Clearly the fact that you haven’t experienced orgasm with another human being in at least five years led to a situation where it deeply compromised your mental faculties. Hopefully it shouldn’t happen again next time.”

_Next time._

Willow’s phobia hadn’t been worsened; in fact, it sounded like he’d succeeded wildly. She wasn’t traumatized by Mycroft breaking his promise not to cut her. She was hurt and frightened that he’d left her, and she wanted him to come home.

Mycroft stood abruptly, reaching for his coat. Then he paused, and looked over at his brother.

“John -- I’m quite certain that John doesn’t think much of what I’ve done.”

Sherlock also stood and straightened his Belstaff to his liking. “John isn’t going to present an obstacle to Willow’s place in your life anymore, Mycroft. I’ve ensured that he fully understands the situation, whether he likes it or not.”

The brothers swept from the room together, Mycroft bemused. “I honestly have a hard time imagining what that conversation looked like.”

“Yes, you do. But as you do know, brother mine, I have my methods.”

Mycroft reflected on the bizarre fact that it turned out that a pep talk from his little brother appeared to have been what he needed after all. “Yes, yes you do, don’t you?” he said wryly in response.


	8. Stabilization

Mycroft was relieved when Sherlock quickly whisked John away from the flat upon their return. Willow was pale, silent and shaking, curled up in the same chair where Mycroft left her. She was dressed in a comfortable shirt and pants now, and John had wrapped a blanket around her shoulders. A full cup of cold tea sat on the table beside her, and as Sherlock had reported, Mycroft saw the glint of metal in the hand in her lap.

He waited silently in the doorway while Sherlock and John cleared out, aware that Willow wasn’t looking at him. Her face was blank, her eyes red from crying. Guilt squeezed his chest uncomfortably, a foreign sensation.

Once they were alone, Mycroft approached her carefully. Her jaw tensed, but she gave no other outward sign of awareness of his presence. He dropped to one knee before her, raised a hand to her cheek and turned her face to him. She was compliant, but her eyes were empty.

Mycroft took a deep breath. “I am so very sorry, my dearest heart,” he said, as gently as he knew how.

He waited, and was relieved when her eyes slowly came into focus. It was as if she were seeing him for the first time, and her breath suddenly hitched in her chest, followed by a soft sob. Mycroft took both of her hands in his, the closed Spyderco enfolded within both of their fingers now.

“I am embarrassed to admit this, but you deserve the complete truth of the matter.” He took a deep breath, preparing to do something that he rarely did. “I left because I was frightened, of myself and of what else I might do to you. You, Willow, did absolutely nothing wrong.” This statement started her tears flowing freely, but he pressed on, knowing that she needed to hear the rest of it as well. “Quite the opposite, I am _incredibly_ proud of you for what you accomplished today. My response was a terrible mistake, and I promise you that it is a mistake that I will _never_ make again. You are _mine_ , and I was wrong to ask someone else to step in and take care of you. Do you understand me?”

He knew he was being clear, but he could see in her eyes how difficult it was for her to take in what he was saying. She blinked, slowly. “You -- you’re not mad at me? I begged you to do it, and then you were upset...”

The terrible tightness in his chest was hot and painful now. “Oh, Willow. My dear Willow.” He pulled her hands to his mouth and kissed her knuckles. “I am _not_ angry at you. The _only_ person here that I am angry at is myself. You are a treasure and a delight, and I repayed you for that poorly today. I was --  Willow, I was a very poor daddy to you today, and you deserve better from me.”

Confusion, now. Clearly she had so thoroughly convinced herself that she was at fault for his abrupt departure that she was having a difficult time adjusting to a new narrative. “You -- really? You’re really not angry?” Her voice dropped off hesitantly as she added, “...Daddy?”

“Oh, sweetheart.” He simply couldn’t stand it anymore. He swept her, blanket and all, into his arms, folding her in against his chest.

He found the noticeable differential in her weight and even her height from three weeks ago to be a heartening reminder of the good that he had done before his colossal misstep. She nestled into his chest, and as he carried her to bed, he ruefully reflected that there would come a day -- perhaps before too long -- when this would not be so easy on his aging back. Her years of malnutrition might result in a shorter stature than she might otherwise have had, but Mycroft judged that she still had quite a few years of healthy growth ahead of her, so it was difficult to guess if she would be tall or not without truly knowing her age.

He tucked her in between expensive satin sheets, then quickly changed into his own pyjamas and joined her. She tucked up under his arm immediately, and he smiled in the dark when he realized that she was still clutching the knife in the hand that came up to rest on his chest.

Perhaps the day had not been a complete failure on his part after all.

* * *

Several months later, Mycroft stood beside the bed in a secure surgical unit, watching with a close eye as the anesthesiologist carefully placed a needle into Willow’s vein.

In the intervening time, the girl’s progress had continued to surpass his predictions. She had put on another stone, shot up another five centimetres, was running four kilometers a day on the treadmill, and was reading at the level of a year eleven student. She had also made it from the flat to the car in the garage, and from the garage into the facility, with no sign of a panic attack, in spite of the fact that Moriarty was still on the loose. She’d been clinging to Mycroft’s side the entire way, eyes wide, but as long as he had his arm around her shoulders she showed no more signs of anxiety than a slightly elevated heart rate.

But more than that, she was beginning to _relax_. Andrea was often able to engage her in conversation when she was at the flat now, about intentionally normal topics that were beyond Mycroft’s ken, such as how women cared for their hair and bodies, or the changing place of girls and women in the modern world, or the details of the school system that Willow had never experienced. Sherlock and John came by occasionally, and John chatted with her during her check-ups about how she thought she was doing in recovery, and various musings that John entertained about possible futures for her.

Willow had once in a while had the opportunity to watch television during her years before Moriarty, so she was not entirely ignorant about the normal world, but it had been limited, and it turned out that she had a lot of questions once she was sure that she was allowed to ask them. And yet, she still only brought them to Mycroft when he opened the topic himself, allowing him to remain entirely in control of how much conversation they shared within their little world of the Pall Mall flat. He gave her a laptop and headphones via which she was allowed to watch an allotment of movies and television shows vetted by Andrea, as even Mycroft had to admit that they provided a window into normality that wasn’t accessible through reading alone.

Mycroft had waited until the night before her surgery to inform her that it was time, and to explain the anesthesia process to her. She had listened closely, but asked no questions about the details of what the actual, physical outcome of the surgery would be. She gave him a strangely knowing look, and Mycroft felt sure that the display of trust was quite deliberate.

Yet again, he was taken aback by the fierceness of his pleasure and satisfaction in her acquiescence to his control and authority. He seriously considered telling her what he had decided, but found that once he was sure that she fully understood the implications of not asking, he preferred to withhold the answer.

That night he put his hands and his mouth all over her, as he had begun doing freely since his ill-planned desensitization exercise had gone so awry. While he’d declined Sherlock’s suggestion that he should abandon all decorum with regards to her sexuality, the truth was that he was fairly sure that the intensified bonding was part of the reason that her progress was so rapid. And god knew that Mycroft enjoyed sinking his teeth into her breasts, now, or her inner thighs, when the whim took him. A firm tug on her hair or a hard tweak of her nipple were equally effective cues to bring the full force of her masochism raging to the surface, and the girl was never so unguarded with her tongue as after she had begun begging him to hurt her. He had memorized every detail of her ravaged genitals with both his fingertips and his tongue, the better to appreciate and document how improved she would be by his intervention.

At the surgical facility, Mycroft watched Willow’s face closely as her eyelids fluttered closed and her muscles relaxed. After two minutes he was satisfied that she was appropriately insensate, and he turned his eyes to the surgical team standing ready.

“I believe I’ve adequately explained the stakes of the outcome of today’s procedure for each of you, both professionally and personally, have I not?” he asked in his very coldest voice.

“Yes, sir,” the head surgeon replied quickly, the tightness around her eyes affirming for Mycroft that the message had fully penetrated.

Mycroft let his eyes pass over each of their faces in turn, fleetingly. He needed no more than a fraction of a second to remind them that he knew in exquisite detail who they were. All but one of them looked exactly the right degree of intimidated, with the final one perhaps just a hair more than was ideal for steady hands. Mycroft would keep an extra close eye on him from his vantage point in the observation room next door, and was ready to replace him at a moment’s notice with one of the back-up staff waiting nearby.

The surgery went swimmingly… no one had expected anything else, not with the team that Mycroft had carefully assembled and prepared. Many hours later the girl was in recovery, sleeping peacefully.

She would need to stay under medical care for a few days if all went well, and Mycroft resented every one of them. The remote and expensive facility ensured that the environment for her recovery was more like a home than a hospital, and Mycroft had had many familiar items brought from the flat, from the bedding that he had used most frequently during her time with him to some of his artwork to replace what was on the walls, and he ensured that they kept the lighting low at all times. He’d been concerned that a strange or hostile environment would set back her recovery from her post-traumatic symptoms, and he ensured that he would be able to stay with her for the first days, sleeping beside her in the queen-sized bed where she lay connected to IV and catheter.

Accordingly he was beside her when she woke, and irrational relief flooded through him when she slowly opened her eyes. She’d never been in any danger, and yet he couldn’t deny how relieved he was to see her awake.

Her hand fluttered on the blanket. “Daddy?”

Mycroft took her hand. “I’m right here, Willow. Everything went very well. You’re recovering beautifully already.”

She was clearly having a hard time focusing, and when she did it was on him. Her fingers tightened around his.

“Are you happy, Daddy?”

“I am very pleased, Willow. Proud of you, and pleased with how the surgery went. I watched the entire procedure, and the doctor was very, very good. You’re going to be lovely.”

She gazed up at him sleepily. “Thank you, Daddy. For helping me.”

A smile touched his lips. “You’re welcome, Willow.”

She opened her eyes again, wider this time, struggling to stay awake, to express herself. “No, Daddy. I mean it. Not just this. I mean, _thank you_. I’ve never said thank you, I’ve been too frightened. You took me away from him. You’ve done everything for me. _Everything_.”

Mycroft gazed at her for a moment, contemplating. Most people would think he ought to be punished for the things he had done to this girl, jailed at minimum and quite possibly hanged at the gibbet. But she was entirely sincere, and had never had reason to thank any human being in her life for anything that had been done to her before the day that Mycroft found her.

For once, he didn’t have to manufacture warmth in his eyes, or in his tone.

“You’re welcome, Willow. And I mean it.” And he meant it.

She healed well, and quickly. Mycroft marveled at youth and health, which had receded from him over the years. She had been such a broken, small thing when he found her, but it was astounding the rate at which she was becoming stronger. _Strong_ , even, in her own way.

Sometimes it haunted him now, the question of whether she might heal so quickly, become so _whole_ that she no longer needed him. Andrea had been expressing the belief throughout Willow’s recovery that the girl still had a chance at normality, and Mycroft was loathe for his PA to notice that the idea filled him with dread, not relief.

Willow still didn’t ask about what was healing between her legs. She simply followed directions, and read the novels and books that Mycroft placed in her hands, watched the media that Andrea approved, helped him cook their meals, and got back on the treadmill at a sedate pace as soon as she was allowed. As soon as he brought her back to the flat he tucked her under his arm again at night, but he didn’t dare to hurt her when she was in such a vulnerable state, and he could tell that she was chafing without it. _That_ reassured him.

John did Willow’s aftercare and check-ups, a fact which infuriated her surgeon, but Mycroft had so much clout that he needn’t worry about that. Whatever Sherlock had said to his flatmate had done its job… John Watson might still disapprove of Mycroft’s relationship with his ward in carefully veiled looks, but not a word passed his lips to suggest as much. He peered between Willow’s legs thoughtfully, administered a course of preventative antibiotics, and reassured them both that the girl would be “better than new” within six weeks of her surgery.

The catheter came out when she left the surgical facility, and John removed the final iteration of her bandages at the two week mark. She was still severely swollen and bruised, but Mycroft was moved by the simplicity of what he saw. She was so much more straightforward than any of the women of his youth, and so trusting in her acceptance of his decision.

In the following month he felt sure -- well, _almost_ sure -- that she peered at the aftermath of the surgery. Did she? Was her trust in him so complete? Was it possible that she could accept any outcome -- that he had had her reconstructed to the female norm, or to his ideal, or to something in between?

It was a long month, without the sadomasochistic interactions that they’d both come to find so soothing, but it gave Mycroft time to reflect, and he knew that it did the same for his young charge. She was filling out quickly. It had been almost six months since the day that Andrea announced to Mycroft that they’d been unsuccessful in cornering Moriarty but successful in acquiring his pet, and Mycroft now knew that his little brother and the criminal mastermind were nearly ready to begin their endgame.

But there was a moment that needed to occur first, he also knew. By now, he had promised Sherlock his prize -- the freedom to take Moriarty down by his own methods. After the ways in which Moriarty had made it personal with Sherlock, going all the way back to Carl Powers, Mycroft could not deny his little brother. But given what he’d put Willow through, Mycroft could not deny her a reckoning of her own, either.

Mycroft knew that it was almost time to bring Moriarty in. Willow needed to be ready; she needed to be the right kind of whole, the right kind of intact. She was the one who had given Mycroft the details, the places, the view out the window that would allow him to bring Moriarty to heel and thus feed him exactly the information that Sherlock wanted fed to him. But until Moriarty was dead, this was the best that Mycroft could offer her -- Sherlock and Willow couldn’t both put a bullet in his brain, and Mycroft didn’t believe that that was the best way forward for his ward anyway. For Sherlock, perhaps… time would tell. For Willow, it was something else that was needed.

And she needed to be ready, if she was going to get the closure that she needed before Sherlock finished it.


	9. Closure

It had been several weeks since Willow’s healing genitals had required dressing, but they’d not spoken of nor acknowledged it directly.

He didn’t intend for her to know about it when this day came, but somehow in their time together she had begun to read him, sometimes, in a way that no one other than Sherlock or Andrea had ever been able to before. Nothing in the activities of their Saturday morning or afternoon should have been a giveaway, but by the time that he laid out her dress for dinner, she was watching him curiously.

There was no point nor need to dissemble, really. He simply hadn’t wanted her to be anxious. “After dinner, we will look together. Then we have an important outing this evening.”

“Yes, Daddy,” she said demurely, then disappeared into the en suite.

Mycroft still cooked for them much more often than he had managed for himself before he brought Willow home, but doing so every night was untenable given his obligations to his work. Andrea kept them fed on the evenings when work interfered, but tonight Mycroft rolled up his shirtsleeves and took down the Misono.

Willow joined him promptly, hair tied prettily away from her face with a velvet ribbon, and took over sous-chefing… she wasn’t as fast as he was after his years of practice, but under his watchful eye she was getting faster, and she didn’t show even a hint of lingering squeamishness around blades.

After dinner Mycroft took Willow back to the bedroom. He placed a chair directly in front of the full-length mirror that stood beside his wardrobe, and indicated it with a jerk of his chin.

She knew what he wanted. She sat, legs parted, the drape of the skirt between her knees all that concealed her from her own view and his.

He stood behind her and put his hands on her shoulder. He could feel a tremor there, but it was subtle. He carded his fingers into her curls, scratching lightly, and she relaxed beneath him.

“Are you ready to see yourself, Willow?”

She took a deep breath and met his eyes in the mirror. “Yes, Daddy.”

Mycroft leaned forward over her and grasped the fabric between her knees, drawing it lightly up her thighs.

Willow’s eyes were bright and focused as she watched, and Mycroft felt a flutter in his stomach. There. She was exposed, her slim thighs spread, and they both looked thoughtfully at the altered -- _corrected_ \-- anatomy between her legs.

She reached down, running her fingers over herself exploratively, discovering what Mycroft had decided her body should be like. Watching this aroused him painfully, but he clamped down hard on the reaction. There was no time for that now. They had things to accomplish tonight, and this wasn’t about him. He didn’t intend to allow a repeat of the desensitization fiasco.

He didn’t rush her though, simply watching with slightly parted lips as her fingertips explored her new contours. She parted her legs further, dipping her fingers inside of herself. She was clearly, extraordinarily aroused, he could see, but she didn’t seem to expect to do anything about it. She just stared in fascination at herself, fingers circling, sliding, touching.

He wanted to touch her as well, but it wasn’t time for that either.

Eventually she shook her head and met his eyes in the mirror.

“Thank you, Daddy,” she said in a breathless voice. “It’s _beautiful_.”

Mycroft smiled. “You’re welcome, Willow.”

She stood and turned toward him expectantly, and he took her hand. Her fingers were slick, but it was a slickness that proved how much she liked having a body that he’d chosen for her, and in that context he found the sensation... gratifying.

“It’s time to go,” he said calmly, and she nodded.

He bundled her into the car, and she sat silent beside him, pressed against his side. She was trembling slightly, and Mycroft suspected that she knew exactly where they were going. How could she know? Perhaps she was simply nervous about being outside of the flat.

Probably she knew.

As at the surgical facility, they exited the vehicle inside of an underground garage, so that she never had to deal with being exposed, outside. The security here was extraordinarily high, so there was no outside to be had anyway.

Andrea greeted them at the door, waving it open with her own ID.

“Good evening, sir. Good evening, Willow. You look lovely tonight.”

“Thank you,” the girl said, her voice nearly steady.

They escorted her through a series of corridors. The facility was bright and clinical, with fluorescent lighting and aggressively white walls. It was not at all like the mahogany halls of power that Mycroft walked at work, or the soothing earth tones of the hospital where she’d had her surgery.

Eventually Andrea paused outside of a huge, heavily secured steel door.

Mycroft turned Willow so that they were facing each other. He brushed her hair back from her forehead, tucking a strand that had escaped her ribbon back behind her ear. She looked back nervously, chewing on her lower lip.

“Do you understand who is inside of this room?” Mycroft asked.

She took a deep breath and nodded. He could see now that she hadn’t been sure, not until now, but she’d suspected. He could see it in her eyes.

“And you have thought about how you want to handle this… conversation?”

Again, a nod.

“He is under our control. He cannot get free and he cannot hurt you. I will be beside you the entire time. You may approach him if you wish, but you do not have to. And you are… free, entirely free, both to say what you like and to do what you like, as long as he’s still breathing when we leave this room.”

“Yes, Daddy.” His words seemed to fortify her, and she straightened up and lifted her chin, which Mycroft chucked affectionately. Willow took another deep breath, got the shaking under control, and nodded.

Mycroft nodded at Andrea, who waved her card in front of the reader, opening the door.

Willow entered the room without any hesitation. Inside was a single heavy metal chair, bolted to the concrete floor. In the chair sat James Moriarty, his wrists chained behind it, his ankles shackled to its legs. He was dressed in clean white scrubs, his feet bare, and Mycroft had made sure that they washed him head to toe this morning. The idiot was grinning widely.

“Ah, my little pet! I had so hoped they would bring you to see me,” Moriarty cackled in his horrible singsong lilt, actually rattling his chains. Tiresome theatrics.

Willow stood silently before Moriarty, studying the man who had tortured her for three years. Mycroft positioned himself to the side, where he could observe both her face and Moriarty’s limited movements without being a distraction.

“Darling, come give Daddy a kiss!” Moriarty crooned. “A cuddle? Climb onto my lap, little pet. I know you’ve missed Daddy so.”

She didn’t flinch at his words. She simply looked at him, narrowing her eyes slightly at Moriarty’s claim to the title that Mycroft had usurped from him so easily. For perhaps the first time since he’d taken her, Mycroft found himself wondering what it was that she was thinking. Her face was impassive. He’d seen her dissociate, but this was different. He hadn’t known that she was capable of it, hadn’t seen it from her before.

“Why so quiet, pet?” Moriarty needled. “I’m going to think you didn’t miss me after all. What has the nasty Ice Man done to you, eh? That’s a pretty frock, but I think you know that it doesn’t suit you as well as bruised and bleeding nudity does.”

“I’m whole now,” she said. Mycroft heard her voice waver, which meant that Moriarty would too.

Indeed the Irishman did, grinning. “Oh, that’s _rich_. How rich is that? Did the Ice Man convince you of that? You’ve been had, honey. Didn’t you know?”

Willow took two measured steps forward. She was now close enough to reach out and touch him if she wanted, and he had to tilt his head back slightly to look up at her. She took a deep breath. “I am whole now,” she said again. This time her voice was steady. “I’m whole, in spite of everything -- in spite of _everything_ that you did to me.”

Moriarty narrowed his glittering eyes. “You misunderstand the word, pet. You can’t make something whole when you only have half the pieces left.”

Face still strangely inscrutable, Willow held a hand out toward Mycroft. Moriarty was still pretending to mirth, but Mycroft noted the way his eyes followed Willow’s movement. The criminal wasn’t as certain of her harmlessness as he pretended to be.

Mycroft pulled a folding knife out of the inner pocket of his jacket and handed it to Willow. The girl was moving slowly, and Mycroft was impressed that her hand didn’t shake as she took the knife and thumbed open the blade, with its soft but distinctive click.

She glanced at the knife, then at Mycroft.

“This isn’t yours,” she said softly. Then, with quickly dawning understanding: “This is _his_.”

Mycroft gave her a small smile.

Moriarty rattled his chains again to get her attention. “And just what do you plan to do with that, sweetling? Nothing as fun as what I’ve done with it, I feel sure.”

She tilted her head, as if considering the answer to his question. Then she leaned forward, grabbed the waist of his scrub pants, pulled them away from his body, and started sawing at it.

The knife wasn’t made for this sort of task -- this was why they’d invented EMT shears after all -- but half of the length of its edge was sufficiently serrated, and she was able to get the job done with a little determination. Moriarty squirmed slightly but made little noise as she sawed haphazardly through the cotton, and after a couple of moments she had the crotch cut open, the shredded fabric fallen away to expose his half-hard cock.

“You _have_ missed me,” Moriarty sang saucily, though Mycroft was satisfied to detect a note of actual alarm that he was attempting to conceal in his voice. Willow ignored him, stepping back a bit to look at what she’d done. She didn’t seem bothered by his tumescence.

Moriarty thrust his hips what little he could in his restrained state, leering. “Well, climb on, then. Let’s show the Ice Man how you _really_ like it.”

Mycroft saw a look of anger pass over Willow’s pretty face like a shadow, but it was gone as quickly as it had appeared, and in its wake she seemed amused. Mycroft saw Moriarty tense.

But instead of assaulting him, she reached down and grabbed the hem of her dress, lifting it over her head and dropping it onto the concrete floor by her feet. She wasn’t wearing knickers, and in the space of a breath her entire body was exposed.

Mycroft staunched his own reaction to the sight -- Moriarty didn’t need the information -- but he was surprised. Then, as he took in Willow’s body language -- confident, defiant -- he wasn’t surprised at all.

She _was_ beautiful, exactly as he’d intended.

All of Moriarty’s bruises had healed, and the extensive scars he’d left had all been minimized by the reducing cream that Mycroft had been using on her religiously. She was strikingly taller, and had put on well over a stone. Her small breasts were fuller, and her waist-to-hip ratio had changed considerably. Her hair was healthy and conditioned and trimmed, her nails clean and polished, her complexion clear. Her nipples crinkled in the cool air of the concrete cell. One of Mycroft’s own livid bites was the only mark on her long, pale body at the moment, on her left breast... he had to admit that that had been on purpose, and he didn't really care if she knew it.

Her mons was smooth all the way down between her thighs, surgically shaven bare. The nub of her clitoris was visible, entirely exposed, nestled just underneath a tidy ridge where the ragged remains of her clitoral hood had cleaned up. Without outer or inner labia, the introitus of her vagina was a visible valley. There wasn’t a single visible scar.

Moriarty looked taken aback. He hid it quickly, but not quickly enough. Mycroft noticed, and he was certain that Willow did as well.

She stared down at him contemptuously.

“I told you, _Jim_ , I’m whole now,” she said. The knife was still in her hand after disrobing, and Mycroft was suddenly sure that she intended to use it.

“You will _never_ be--” Moriarty begin to spit.

Those were the words that he got out before Willow lunged forward. She grabbed Moriarty’s half-hard cock roughly by the swollen purple glans, pulling it away from his groin, and…

She sank the gleaming blade of his own custom engraved Spyderco Delica between the two corpora cavernosa of Moriarty’s penis, the tip of the blade impacting the metal seat hard enough to blunt it considerably.

Moriarty howled, long and loud. Mycroft didn't wince at the noise, watching impassively as blood began to spurt, splattering on Willow’s bare arm and torso.

The girl stepped back quickly, relinquishing her hold on his anatomy and keeping the knife, not seeming the least bit disturbed by what she’d just done. Because Moriarty had been somewhat engorged, blood spurted all the way onto her chin and chest, but she merely stood watching impassively as he bled and screamed.

Mycroft stepped forward. He put a hand on Willow’s bare shoulder.

“I think that’s enough, don’t you?” he said, just loudly enough to be heard over the anguished sounds that Moriarty was making.

At the moment, he wasn’t sure if he would have let Willow proceed with further torture or not. He had promised Sherlock his reckoning, and he’d need to get the madman into the on-site OR if he was going to avoid bleeding out while in custody.

Willow just gave him a strange look, bent over to retrieve her dress, and strode out of the room as she pulled it over her head. Mycroft followed, leaving Andrea on clean up with a look. Nothing shocked Andrea, but she looked thoughtful.

Willow stalked fiercely through the halls of the facility. Mycroft trailed on her heels, garnering double-takes from long-time staff who had never seen Mycroft Holmes trailing after another human being. The girl's bloodied state may have contributed to the looks as well.

He knew that she knew that he was there, but it was clear that in this moment she was in charge of herself, and he found a knot forming in his stomach at the thought.

She led him back to the car, where she opened her own door and crawled in before him, again new behavior. As Mycroft seated himself beside her, breathing in the comforting smell of expensive leather, Willow leaned forward toward the driver.

“St. James Park, please,” she instructed. The driver caught Mycroft’s eyes in the rearview mirror, and he raised an eyebrow at her expectantly.

It was almost an hour from the facility on the outskirts of London back into the centre of town. Willow sat silently in her pretty velvet dress, her right arm, chest and face splattered liberally with drying blood.

The driver parked at the east end of the park, across from Downing Street, and Willow slid out of the car and into the open, exposed evening air. It was literally the first time that he’d ever seen her outdoors, and probably the first time she’d _been_ outdoors since the last time Moriarty had dragged her along in his travels.

It occurred to him that, in a sense, this moment was her first moment of true freedom. Or possibly it had been seventy-six minutes ago, when she’d sunk a knife through Moriarty’s most intimate anatomy so hard it bounced off the metal chair beneath. It was difficult to be sure, as her mood was still somewhat opaque to him at the moment.

Mycroft was certain of one thing: that this change in her demeanor was a positive step, a positive sign of her recovery and healing. He strongly suspected and feared a second thing: that this step might not be so positive for his own interests. Either way, she spent a long moment simply standing beside the car, looking around her, taking in the ducks and pelicans on the edge of the water, the imposing facades of Whitehall across the street.

“I suppose you haven’t really seen much of London,” Mycroft mused. He was standing near her but not touching her, aware that she wasn’t leaning toward him as she normally did when he was physically close by.

“Not really.” Her voice was pensive. “Nothing I was ever meant to enjoy, anyway. Westminster is over there?” She pointed with her chin in the correct direction. This did not surprise Mycroft, whose supervision of her internet use had made him aware that she spent a great deal of time on Google maps, exploring the geography of London or of other locations that had caught her interest, presumably in a book or movie.

She led them on a meandering path through the park, then around Westminster Abbey and Parliament and south along the Thames. He may not have fully understood what she was thinking, but he was quite certain of what he was witnessing: the little girl that he’d rescued, healed, and reconstructed had decided that her world no longer needed to be limited to the safe haven that Mycroft provided for her in Pall Mall. The knot in his stomach grew tighter, and he felt tension in his shoulders as he walked beside her.

Willow climbed the steps to one of the benches in the little triangular patch of green park snugged up against the river below Parliament. There he watched her gazing glassy-eyed across the brown water of the Thames, taking in the lights of London. It was a city where she’d spent three long years being physically, sexually and psychologically tortured, and they would probably never know where she’d come from before the abduction that had eventually put her in James Moriarty’s path.

“I suppose London must be home as much as anywhere can be,” she mused, confirming that he'd accurately discerned her thoughts.

“Based on your life so far, that’s true. But it is up to you where you’d like your home to be going forward.” Mycroft was uncomfortably aware of his heart rate increasing at the topic. They’d never exchanged a word on what her life might be like in the future, not since Mycroft’s early reassurances that she would be allowed to stay in his home until she decided for herself to leave.

At that time, he’d had no idea how attached he would become to the outcome of her decision. Willow glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, and he wondered if she knew that he wasn’t nearly as calm as his facade suggested.

“How could I ever go anywhere else? I don’t have money, or ID.” The question didn’t sound resentful, and he was aware that what he was hearing was a test, not an inquiry.

“Those can both be easily rectified,” he said evenly.

“How could I have an ID? I don’t even have an _identity_.” Now there was a bit of an edge to her voice.

“Of course you do.”

She snorted. “ _Willow,”_ she said derisively.

There was a sharp pang in his chest. Once, what seemed like a very long time ago, when he had earned those very first words from her, he had asked her what her name was, and then asked her if she wanted to keep it. In response she had asked if _he_ liked it, and he had told her that it suited her.

Back then, it had. No longer, however.

“If you don’t care for the name that your original captors gave you, then you should choose another,” Mycroft said. “I’ll have some appropriate ID and a credit card established for you in whatever name you like.”

“Any name I ever have will just be made up, whether it’s Willow or something else.”

“Everyone’s name is ‘just made up.’”

Again, the sideways look. “Yours isn’t.”

“Certainly it is. It was simply ‘made up’ a much longer time ago.”

Obviously the thought hadn’t occurred to her quite that way, and she considered it for a moment.

“Do you know what it means? Your name?” she asked.

“It refers to someone who lives in a small, enclosed field, next to a holly tree, at the mouth of a stream.”

His bland recitation made her laugh, and for a moment Mycroft’s heart lightened. _You’ve become beholden to the whims and moods of a girl who you know to be several years shy of adulthood, and who could, should and probably will outgrow you and leave you as a simple matter of time,_ he thought to himself, half in disgust and half in amazement, and made sure that the thought did not show in a twist of his mouth.

“But _none_ of those are true of you!” she protested.

“No. You know, I’ve never asked my parents about their insistence on giving us such unusual names. I’ve never been sure that I want to know what they were thinking.”

His words turned her head, and he gave her a small smile as she studied him, waiting to see where her mind would go next.

“It’s difficult to imagine you as a child. But you were my age once.”

“Indeed I was. It seems a very long time ago now, and things were very different then. I came from a very different situation than you do.”

Her eyes, still on him, narrowed thoughtfully. It was clear that she was formulating another question.

“Had anyone ever hurt you when you were my age? I don’t mean hurt your feelings… I mean, had anyone ever _really_ hurt you?”

“Yes. Although I'm not going to tell you the details, not right now.” Mycroft raised an eyebrow at her. “Tell me, why are you asking me about this?”

“To see if you’d answer.” She didn’t seem abashed by this, and Mycroft’s mouth twitched.

Testing. This was _all_ testing.

It made sense, really. In the wake of reducing the object of her terror, she was trying to figure out how she now perceived _Mycroft’s_ power over her.

In order to confront her abuser, she’d found within herself -- he’d helped her to _cultivate_ \-- a source of strength, of agency. She’d known that she would need it; she’d known that there was one room in the world in which she could not rely on drawing her strength from Mycroft, not if she wished to emerge intact, and that was the room that they’d just visited. But now, now that she had discovered that strength, she still had access to it, didn’t she? It was hers, all hers. And yet here they were, still with her future, and therefore the future of the strange life he’d built for them, to navigate.

Mycroft didn’t like the fear and anxiety that her testing was stirring up in him. He didn’t like it at all. He’d spent twenty years being tested by his superiors, his peers and his underlings as he ruthlessly clawed his way up the ladder of power, stepping on the heads of those below as he ascended without losing a second of sleep about it. He’d spent his entire _life_ being tested by his petulant little brother. And now a little girl was going to be the one to get under his skin?

Apparently so.

Mycroft took a deep breath and turned toward her.

“What name would you like me to put on your ID, Willow?” he asked, putting just the slightest edge in his voice to ensure that she understood that he was running out of patience with the game that she was playing.

A couple of months ago that voice would have made her cringe. Tonight she just raised her eyebrows in response, and smiled at him.

“Elizabeth Charlotte Holmes,” she said evenly.

Mycroft blinked.

He blinked a second time, and that was when he noticed that his mouth was hanging slightly open although he didn’t recall opening it.

He closed his mouth and blinked again, then looked out over the Thames, blankly.

“Oh,” he said.

“Do you like it?”

“Yes. Very much. I think you knew I would. Thank you.”

“Good.”

She didn’t seem to have anything else to say after that.

After a few moments of sitting silent and dazed by his own emotions on the riverside, Mycroft rose and was relieved and gratified when the girl -- Willow? Elizabeth? -- followed suit obediently.

 


	10. Catharsis

Back at the flat, Mycroft turned on the kettle, then led her to the sitting room and placed her in one of the wingback chairs before the fireplace. He turned on the gas, instantly casting a warm glow against her skin. She curled up, tucking her feet beneath her, and watched him curiously as he went back to make the tea.

Shortly he handed her a mug and seated himself across from her. “It’s time that we have a _very_ serious conversation, Elizabeth. Do you understand?”

She nodded, face grave. “I understand, Daddy.”

Mycroft studied her, steeling himself for what he needed to do. “Elizabeth, do you remember my first name? I told you when I introduced myself, and you’ve heard Sherlock and John use it.”

She stared at him with wide eyes for a moment. “Y-yes. I think so.”

“And it is?”

It looked almost physically effortful for her to say it. “Mycroft. Mycroft Holmes.”

“Good girl. That’s right. Now, for the duration of this conversation I am calling to call you by your new name, Elizabeth, and you are going to call me Mycroft. This will help with what we need to accomplish. Now show me, my good girl.”

“You would like me to call you by your first name… Mycroft.”

“Very good, Elizabeth.” He paused. “Now, I believe that you understand that the life that you’ve had so far -- before Moriarty purchased you, and with him, and here with me -- are all very different from the world that most girls grow up in this day and age.”

“Yes, Mycroft.” She was hanging on his every word.

“I also believe that you understand that everything that James Moriarty did to you was very, very wrong, and that the vast majority of people in the world would consider him a monster for it, and the people who sold you to him to be monsters as well. Society says that everyone involved ought to be locked up and heavily punished for many years for the injustices that you’ve survived.”

“Yes.” Her eyes narrowed slightly, her jaw tensing, and Mycroft could see that she didn’t like the direction that he was going with this.

He did not much care for this next part himself, but it had to be gotten through. “I am… unsure, Elizabeth, whether you also understand that almost as many people would consider _me_ to be a monster for the relationship that I have with you, for keeping you here and the things that I do to you.”

Had the stakes been any lower, Mycroft might have laughed out loud at the look of genuine confusion on her face. “But -- you rescued me? And fixed me? And take care of me?”

He allowed himself a faint smile at her response. “Yes. And I find it delightful that it seems that simple and straightforward to you. However, I need you to understand quite thoroughly that the vast majority of people in the civilized world consider any adult man inflicting pain and having sexual contact with a girl as young as you to be inherently monstrous, regardless of whether they were doing it to destroy you or to save you. Do you understand what I am saying?”

The gears were turning in her head. She didn’t have a lot of normative social context yet, but she and Andrea had been working on it together in a focused fashion for a while now, and he watched her trying to put the puzzle pieces together in her head.

“You’re saying that you would look the same as -- _him_ , as Moriarty, to other people, if they knew that you were my real daddy. This is what made John upset with you, at first, before Sherlock explained to him that you were helping me.”

“Yes.”

“Would you -- would you get into trouble, if anyone other than Sherlock and John and Andrea knew I was here?”

“This part is hard to explain. Because of who I am, because of the nature of the work that I do, I would not get into trouble the way that other men would. I would not have criminal charges brought against me, and a court trial, and a prison sentence. You know what all of those things mean?”

“Yes, kind of.”

“But what would happen, Elizabeth, is that when the very, very few people with the power to hurt me found out, is that it would very badly impede and quite likely  _end_ my ability to do the work that I do thereafter.”

“Which, for you, would be worse than those other things.”

Insightful. “Yes.”

She was clearly still thinking hard about what he was saying, so rather than continuing on, Mycroft paused to let this part sink in as deeply as possible.  She didn’t like anything he was saying, but she was taking him seriously, as he’d asked. After a moment, she looked up at him, eyes bright with the realization.

“You’re telling me -- you’re telling me that right now, tonight, after you fall asleep, I could get out of bed and walk out the front door, down the hall, find someone in another flat, and ask for help, and as a result your life would basically be ruined, right?”

“Yes, that’s right, sweetheart.”

“But _Daddy_.” She slipped, sputtering in her outrage. “I would _never_ try to get you in trouble. Why would I _want_ that?”

He raised his hands appeasingly. “I understand that, dear. But I need you to understand that’s not actually my point. My point is that you understand what you _could_ choose to make happen, not whether you’re going to.”

She subsided, mollified. “Okay. I -- I think I  understand that -- Mycroft.”

He nodded approvingly. “Good girl. And do you understand _why_ I’m explaining this to you?”

Elizabeth stared at him, chewing her lower lip.

“Not many people in the whole world have the power to do anything that might actually hurt you, do they?”

“No, they do not. I believe that the list at current consists of Sherlock, Andrea, and you.”

“And Sherlock is your brother. And Andrea has worked for you for like a thousand years.”

The moment of childish exaggeration, so unlike her, amused him. “Yes.”

“And I’m a stray girl that you took home out of James Moriarty’s trash.”

“That’s true, but you’re implying that I don’t trust you the way that I trust Sherlock and Andrea, and that’s _not_ true.”

She didn’t say anything to that right away, just studied him with a strangely incisive look. Mycroft was surprised at the fleeting urge to squirm beneath her regard. Again, he let her take her time.

After a moment, she sat forward, a look of determination coming into her eyes.

“Okay. I think I understand why you’re telling me this.”

“Very good.”

“And I know what I want to say back to you about it, but… but I’ve never been to school, or read many books, and I can’t say it the way that you would.”

Mycroft arched a brow. “I understand that, Elizabeth. And yet, I’m very curious to hear whatever it is that you would like to say, so I’d like you to try. Please take your time.”

“Okay.” She looked nervous. “I don’t know much yet of the things I’m supposed to know if I were a normal girl. And I don’t know anything that would let me live on my own, I know. Like you said, my life hasn’t been like other girls’ lives.”

“Yes.”

She looked him in the eye. “But there is _one_ thing that I know pretty well. Much better than most people.”

Mycroft raised an eyebrow. “And that is?”

“I know about men who like to hurt girls.”

He was surprised at how discomfited he was by the forwardness of this statement. “I suppose that’s true, Elizabeth. You would know about that.”

“I’m -- I’m going to tell you a few of the things I’ve learned.”

Oh. Did she have to?

“Please do.”

“Okay. Look, Da -- Mycroft. I know a _lot_ about James Moriarty, and I’m starting to learn some things about you. And I know that what he cared about and what you care about are very different. I know that he is a monster, and you aren’t. I don’t care what you say that normal people say or what the law says or what police or judges say. I happen to know that I’m better qualified than anyone else in the world to comment on the difference between him and you.”

He was touched. “You certainly have a point, and thank you for saying so.”

She stared at him, chewing her lip, then pushed forward. “I also know that the two of you do have some things in common.”

He hesitated. “You are, of course, right about that as well.”

“You both… you both have minds that work so fast that it’s difficult for you to be patient with how slowly everyone else thinks around you. Your brother has it too, I think, though you hide it a lot better than Sherlock or Moriarty. But you do hate it, don’t you? The aggravation of waiting for everyone else to catch up?”

“Yes, I do.”

“He was so very very bored. He did… _everything_ that he did to me because he was bored. He always said that that’s the only reason he ever did anything. He -- he found me, bought me, raped me, starved me, tortured me, trained me, all because he was bored.”

“Yes.”

“But you… I think that you are also bored. But you’re not impulsive, like Moriarty or Sherlock. But you… when you found me, when you rescued me, you were just as bored as Moriarty was when he bought me… but what it occurred to _him_ to do with a girl that he could own was to destroy her, and what it occured to _you_ to do with a girl that you could own was to rebuild me.”

Mycroft sat back in his chair, studying her thoughtfully. These insights were surprising him.

“Yes. All accurate, I concede.”

Uncertainty crossed her face, piquing his interest. He didn’t think she was uncertain about whatever she intended to say next; his suspicion was that her only uncertainty was whether to say it.

“Go ahead,” Mycroft coaxed. This wasn’t pleasant, but it was data that he needed to collect.

She licked her lips and turned her gaze away. “Moriarty… it doesn’t feel right to call him Moriarty, or to call him -- to call him what he made me call him. May I -- may I call him James?”

Her request made sense, as Mycroft had just shown her the trick of inviting her onto slightly less uneven footing with him by insisting she use his own given name. “Yes, you may, Elizabeth.”

A fleeting smile ghosted over her face at the sound of her new name, but it faded quickly before the melancholic shift that had occurred when she looked away. He understood the loss of eye contact now that he knew that she intended to talk in greater detail about Moriarty.

“James… sometimes he was actually nice.” She paused. “And sometimes acting nice was a trick, so that it would be worse when he went... _cold,_ and started torturing me again. But there were times -- it was always in the middle of the night when we were alone and there was no one else in the flat, when he -- he was nice to me, and it was -- it felt real. I think it was real. Just a little bit.”

Mycroft schooled his expression carefully, not wanting her to see the maelstrom of unpleasant emotions that her comments evoked in him. “It can be very confusing for someone who is being abused when her abuser turns out to be a three-dimensional human being who is occasionally capable of kindness or gentleness.”

Elizabeth nodded slowly. “Yes. It _was_ confusing. But, it was also… it has been so rare in my life for anyone to be nice to me, that when it happened, I just --” She trailed off, at a loss to express herself.

He knew where she was going, though. “You accepted his kind moments, and you feel now as if you should have rejected them. But that’s not true, Elizabeth.” She looked surprised at his words, and her eyes flew back to his face, searching his expression for signs of his sincerity.

“You endured a degree and length of deprivation and torture that few people in this world outside of the theatre of war can relate to,” Mycroft explained. “By accepting the rare moments of normal human connection or kindness that were offered to you, you strove to -- and _succeeded_ at -- surviving through _extraordinary_ hardship. It is probably because you did not reject those moments that you were still able to bond to me in spite of the fact that I was not mistreating you.”

Tears welled up in her eyes as he spoke, spilling silently down her cheeks. She took a few slow, deep breaths, calming herself as he had taught her during those terrible long hours on the treadmill when he was first debriefing her.

“Okay. I think that makes sense. I’ll have to think about it.” Another pause. “But what I wanted to tell you was that I learned something about James during those moments when he let his guard down. Something that you’ve never asked me about.”

Mycroft shifted forward slightly. “Yes?”

She finally looked up at him. “He was incredibly lonely.”

Her words shouldn’t have been totally unexpected, and yet they hit Mycroft like an emotional punch to the gut. He suddenly realized where Elizabeth was going with this, and simultaneously realized that he wasn’t prepared for it. If he let her go there, he wasn’t sure of himself, and that was unacceptable.

“All those games that he played with you and Sherlock, that I heard you talking about, were because he was bored, yes, that’s what he always said. But it wasn’t _just_ boredom. He wanted a distraction, but even more than that, he wanted… others to play _with_. On his level.”

“Sometimes when he was in a nice mood, if I could pull myself together and manage to, you know, be playful back… we did a lot of puzzles together. We made brownies and cakes and did all kinds of puzzles and games. He taught me how to play chess, and he was shocked and so, so happy with me when he figured out that I actually had a knack for strategy when it’s that clear-cut. The first time that I played him to a stalemate, he was in a good mood for three days, and it was the most food I’d eaten in so long. I ate too much and threw up, but he thought it was funny so he let me keep eating.”

She paused.

“But the best I could manage was to entertain him, to help him pass time. I think from his perspective teaching me to play chess was like teaching a dog to roll over and beg. I could distract him, but I couldn’t keep him company, not the way that you and Sherlock can, you know, keep each other company. When James was playing with Sherlock, he felt, not only entertained, but also… less lonely.”

Elizabeth paused again, and Mycroft knew that this was the time to stop her, to interrupt her. Instead he sat as silent and still as if he’d been muzzled, for some reason allowing the girl to proceed.

And proceed she did. She was not looking away in shame now, but looking Mycroft straight in the eye in a way that she had never done unprompted in the previous six months.

“I’m probably the only person on earth who he allowed to see that,” she said, very softly. “He had such complete control of me, it was the only way he felt safe letting anyone see it.”

Mycroft stared at her, his blood turned to ice in his veins at the plain implications of her assessment of her situation with James Moriarty. Which had been, in the relevant ways, absolutely identical to her situation with Mycroft himself.

She knew exactly what she was saying, and meant it exactly.

“ _You_ were lonely, weren’t you, Mycroft?” she asked gently.

He didn’t open his mouth, because he didn’t know what to say.

Elizabeth was unfazed by this. She got up from her chair and came to him, and slowly, so that he could stop her if he wanted to, she sat down in his lap, curled up, and slipped her arms around his neck, putting her face against the side of his neck, at his collar.

“You were lonely, weren’t you, Daddy?”

His arms tightened around her, and he let his head fall forward, slumping into her, nuzzling into the space between her ear and her shoulder. The girl squirmed slightly, in satisfaction, tightening her hold around his neck, slipping her small fingers into the short hair closest to the nape of his neck.

Mycroft breathed deeply, inhaling the scent of blood, yes, James Moriarty’s blood, which neither he nor Elizabeth had yet made any sort of effort toward cleaning up, but underneath the blood was the scent of the girl that Mycroft had come to consider to genuinely belong to him somewhere along the way.

Part of Mycroft knew why Elizabeth had put this much work into wringing this confession from him. She trusted him; he had rescued her and he was her hero; he had situated himself directly in the middle of her healing process and made every focused effort to condition the girl to think of “Mycroft” and “safety” as the same thing.

And yet she’d suffered her entire life at the hands of men with violent appetites, and she was more aware than anyone else in the world of how much sadism Mycroft himself was capable.

Elizabeth was wily in her very specific ways, a fast learner, and a close observer, but she did not share anything like the vaunted intellect that the Holmes brothers had so rarely encountered in anyone other than each other. For the first time, holding Elizabeth in his lap and feeling her tears on his collar without any irritation whatsoever, he understood what sort of comfort and solace Sherlock might have found with John Watson in spite of the fact that the good doctor was supposedly just another goldfish.

Her very specific set of needs meant that she found stability and safety fulfilling the dual role of Mycroft’s daughter and his lover, and it was because she was ‘just another goldfish’ in the ways that mattered that he didn’t have to be concerned by her proximity to his work. She could sleep in his bed, keep him cooking, and provide comfort and company while he took care of her and guided her growth.

The girl was working so hard to wring this confession from him in order to have one very small but very real bit of power over the man who controlled her life.

Mycroft intended to be the last man to occupy that role. If someday she could function independently then he would consider it a job very well done and would spend the rest of his life hiding his self-inflicted heartbreak. But he would not simply hand her off to anyone else…. She would remain his or she would become her own before deciding to give herself to anyone else, he was determined about that.

Which meant that, right now, Mycroft could actually afford to be magnanimous.

Which, he admitted to himself, was another way of saying that he was safe enough with the girl in his arms to give her the honest answer to her question.

“Yes, Elizabeth,” he said softly into her unruly hair, the color so different but the texture so similar to how Sherlock’s curls had felt when he was still small and cuddly. “I was, indeed, lonely, dreadfully so, although I had grown numb over time to the fact of my own loneliness. I didn’t realize it until I had your company. At first keeping you simply seemed like the most expedient way to the intelligence that you possessed, and a welcome project to pass some time as well. But like James Moriarty, apparently, once I had the privilege of your company it illuminated for me the emptiness of those hours of my previous life, I discovered that I became rather more attached to you than I’d anticipated.”

She squeezed his neck. “Lucky for me,” she whispered in a happy voice.

Mycroft scoffed lightly at that, then shook his head. “Lucky for us _both_ , I’d say, my little blood-drenched darling.”

He could feel her blush in his arms at his words. The flirtation reminded him of what lay ahead when he took his little girl to bed for the night, and he felt a certain stirring inside at the reminder of the other needs that they had found themselves fulfilling nicely complementary roles around.

“Is it time to go to bed then, do you think, dear Elizabeth?” he asked lightly, finding a certain curiosity rising to the surface at the prospect of finding out whether the days’ experiences would change Elizabeth’s relationship to her own masochistic sexuality.

“In just a moment, Daddy,” she replied, and Mycroft found himself again contending with the unexpected sensation of the exercise of agency on her part. Now that they were home again and he was contemplating taking her back to his bed and all that that had come to entail, he found the frission surprisingly pleasant instead of ominous.

“Yes?” Mycroft sat back a bit so that they could see one another, gaving her a quizzical look.

“You think that I asked you to admit that you were lonely so that I could have some power over you, don’t you?”

It was late. It had been a long and eventful day. Her awareness that he had sussed out her reasoning, and the boldness to call him on it directly, both took him genuinely by surprise. He knew that his face answered her question, so he didn’t bother to lie.

“Of course, honey. But you know I’m not upset by that.”

She shook her head. “No. That’s not it, Daddy. I just want you to know… that’s not actually why I did it. I did it because it was good for _you_ , Daddy.”

“Good for me?” The corner of Mycroft’s mouth lifted in amusement.

“Yes,” she replied solemnly, quite sincere on the matter. “I know that because you’re my daddy, it’s your job to take care of me, but I love you, Daddy, and I want to be with you forever, and so you’re going to have to accept that one of my jobs is going to be to learn how to take care of you back. And as the only person who sleeps with you every night and eats with you every day and reads with you every evening, I was the only one in a position to realize that you needed to admit that you were lonely to me, for your own sake.”

She had a steely look in her eye that he’d not seen before. Here was the young woman who had retaliated against her abuser by mutilating him in return, only here that hidden fierce streak was directed at protecting Mycroft, not revenge against Moriarty.

Mycroft decided that he actually rather liked it, and he found himself smiling down at her as he brushed her hair back away from her eyes.

“I see. Well, in that case, my dear, I would be sorely disappointed if the truth weren’t that you were perfectly aware of both of your accomplishments with that exchange -- it was _both_ to your advantage and for my own good. Otherwise I haven’t really taught you anything yet, have I?”

She laughed, with genuine carefree delight, and Mycroft felt the warmth inside that only Elizabeth elicited. Then she put her head back down against his chest and nuzzled into him affectionately. “Now, please, let’s go to bed, Daddy.”

Mycroft picked her up and carried her to the bedroom, where he placed her on the bed and drew her stained frock over her head. She looked down at herself, saw how much blood still covered her skin, and looked up at him, grinning.

Mycroft hardened instantly at the sight. James Moriarty’s blood liberally painted the mouth-watering planes and curves of her torso above the unnaturally smooth expanse where her mutilated vulva had once been. Moriarty had attempted to destroy that body; Mycroft had rescued and perfected it. He could have suppressed his erection -- well, mostly, anyway -- but after the last six months he felt that she had earned the right to see the evidence of her effect on him.

Her lips were slightly parted, her eyes shining. The extraordinary visual -- her auburn curls spilling around her shoulders, her young skin almost impossibly pale and creamy, with dark blood spattered across it in a pattern that only a pumping heart and a gushing wound could create -- it was, he knew, burned into his brain for the rest of his life. He took a quiet satisfaction in the knowledge that no one could ever take this moment from him, no matter what trials he would have to endure before his final release from his duties. No one would ever be able to take from him the knowledge of the immense promise of what was to come tonight.

 _No one would ever be able to take this girl from him_ , he whispered to himself.

He pushed the thought aside… it wasn’t time to worry about nor to plan for the future right now.

Mycroft moved closer, lifted her hand, and pressed a kiss to her bloody knuckles. Then he thoughtfully ran his fingers down her pretty jawline as she gazed up at him.

He then shrugged out of his jacket, which he hung on the clothing valet next to the mirror. He removed his cufflinks and tie pin, returning them to their places in the velvet-lined box on top of his bureau. The sleeve garters followed, after which he neatly rolled each sleeve of his robin’s egg blue shirt back twice, no, three times, to just above the elbow. His pocketwatch and its chain went into its box in the top drawer, which left him in one of his very favorite silk ties -- turquoise and deep purple -- and a snugly-tailored waistcoat with a purple silk back... he still looked dignified and smart, but with a considerably improved range of motion.

Of course he was watching her watching him out of the corner of his eye. He’d learned early in his life how women were affected by the sight of a man in a well-cut suit preparing himself for a sexual encounter, and evidently the girl he’d previously called Willow was no exception. By the time that he was in the desired state, she was shifting on the bed, the play of muscles in her thighs making clear that she was pressing them together in order to avoid leaving a wet spot on his comforter.

Mycroft approached her and pulled her to her feet, guiding her to the foot of the bed, halfway between the two tall cherrywood posters. Then he took a couple of steps back and studied her closely, pretending to be considering how to begin, as if he hadn’t planned that part long ago. No, the time was for effect, on her. And to gather data while he considered the scenarios before him.

The intensity of this kind of naked regard didn’t take long to chip away at her newfound composure. Her limbs and her bottom lip began to tremble at about the same time. Her nipples were so tight with arousal that they stood up more than a centimetre above her darkened areolas, and the fluids that leaked from her exposed vagina shined on her thighs.

“You did a very good job this evening, sweetheart.” Mycroft’s pitched his voice low and warm, intimate.

“I did?” She brightened, and her sweet responsiveness paired with her aroused and discomposed state and how very young she looked when she perked up like this… It was hard for him to ignore how warped what he’d done to her was at moments like these, when she looked more the schoolgirl than any other time.

It wasn’t that he disliked how she looked. No, that would have made it a tad easier, actually.

“You did, sweetheart. Absolutely. Tell me, how do you feel now about what you did?”

She did her best to think through the growing haze of her anticipatory arousal. “I feel good about it, Daddy,” she said firmly, and nodded. “He deserved it.”

Mycroft tucked his hands into his trouser pockets. “That he did, my dear. I wonder, would you like a reward for what you did?”

She almost bounced on her toes, then caught herself. “Yes, _please_ , Daddy,” she breathed, eyes alight.

He suppressed a grin, reminding himself again how few decent human beings would find anything about what was happening in this room to be ethically acceptable.

 _What’s new about that idea?_ They’d covered that ground now, and accordingly he shook it off.

“In that case, you may suggest two rewards that you would like. I will grant you one of the two.” He supposed it was conceivable that she would be able to come up with more than one scenario that he couldn’t rationalize acceptably, but he knew he could talk his way through that unlikely possibility.

He long ago decided that committing every micro-expression of this evening to permanent storage was worth the bandwidth and memory. Right now her face was an exquisite study in determination and frustration by turns for about forty seconds as she thought furiously through her options. Mycroft found that he was enjoying this part immensely, and had no urge to rush her.

But she didn’t seem to need long to come up with possibilities -- no, from her sequence of expressions, clearly her struggle was in narrowing it down to just two. He was fairly certain that she got it down to four in the first ten seconds, and the rest of the time was spent getting from four down to two. Several times she thought that she’d arrived at her final choices, and then changed her mind again right before she got the words out.

Finally she decided, and looked up at him eagerly. “Please fuck me, Daddy. Or… or beat me.”

Both had been high in his list of anticipated answers. The way to handle this scenario was obvious, and Mycroft felt an immediate squeezing sensation in both his chest and his scrotum, as he assimilated the idea that certain until-now-hypothetical scenarios were now about to become reality. He hadn’t responded yet, but she read in his particular non-response that at least one of her suggestions was acceptable, and her chest flushed and her ears turned pink.

But Mycroft wasn’t quite there. “Under the circumstances, I’m going to require you to be extremely clear, my dear. What do you mean by ‘fucking’?”

“Anything you want, Daddy. Please. However you want, in any hole.”

Interesting. Both her blunt language, and that she was refusing to narrow it down. It was strategic; she wanted to know how he would interpret that leeway.

“I see. Thank you. And now please clarify ‘beating’.”

She swallowed, firming her jaw. “ _He_ \-- he used to beat me for _days_ , when he was really high. With -- he’d start with his hands, slapping me in the face over and over, then he used his fists on my body _,_ and then his belt. Then he worked up to other things from the cupboard, like the whips, or that… that fucking _bat_ that he loved that I told you about once on the treadmill.”

Her breathing was starting to accelerate, and Mycroft shifted forward incrementally, getting ready to interrupt her trauma spiral and remind her to breathe. But she noted the movement, and took her cue from him without any further urging -- he saw her eyes focus again as she reminded herself that she was _here_ , not there, and it was _now_ , not then.

She continued, her voice half an octave lower, and her cadence slower again. “He did it to get excited, and then he’d spent the next several days rotating between fucking me, beating me, and the insane projects he used to do.”

“Sometimes… I thought that it might be something that would -- that I might _like_ , maybe, if it weren’t him, if I weren’t always afraid he would lose it and kill me, if it were someone who -- who I felt safe with, and who I knew was going to take care of me. I know that probably doesn’t make any sense, but you know how I am…” she trailed off self-consciously.

“It certainly makes sense, every word of it,” Mycroft reassured her.

He circled around Elizabeth, his hand on her shoulder, and sat down at the foot of the bed. She turned with him as he moved, so that she was facing him when he pulled her toward him. She complied eagerly, and Mycroft took her hands and pulled her across his lap, face-down. She squirmed across his knees, making small sounds.

She may have been in a hurry, but Mycroft was most decidedly not, and happily he was in charge of… well, everything, really. He took a moment to savor the sight before him -- her still-lengthening legs splayed out on one side, and on the other, the pretty lines of her supple spine, her smooth back and shoulders, almost as freckled as his own. The column of her neck was tight and trembling, her curls tumbling forward over her pale shoulders.

He thought back to finding her, cowering, filthy and battered in another man’s closet. His accounting of the passage of time was very precise, but he had to admit that a subjective part of him was experiencing the phenomenon of having a difficult time believing that his life had changed so much in so short a period.

It had been five years now since he’d bothered to seek out any form of partnered sex. Five years, two months, and eleven days, on the day that he found this girl in Moriarty’s closet. As it stood now, he’d put his hands and mouth on every inch of her body many times over, but he’d not had sex with her in any sense of the word, nor allowed her to pleasure him. He could have, and on the Saturday of the desensitization fiasco Sherlock had creepily encouraged him to do so. And yet she’d still never seen him in less than pyjamas.

Mycroft considered all of this with a definite feeling of satisfaction as he ran his hands over her body. Now he was glad that he hadn’t bothered in so long. It was going to be an excruciatingly long time before he could allow himself to take his full pleasure from the girl laid out across his lap, but it felt so, so right to know how fully she was his and how long he had worked to ensure that he’d made her so the correct way in spite of the way that he’d found her.

Back, buttocks, thigh and calves, he traced her developing curves almost reverently. He’d never really touched her like this before -- not for an extended period, or without the soothing, grounding motion of his hands acting as a counterpoint to the infliction of pain elsewhere.

Mycroft struck her right arsecheek, sharply.

He’d lulled her into a light languor, and she started at the sudden violence. He didn’t wait before delivering a second blow, then a third, alternating sides. He could feel the tensing and squirming in her thighs, signaling her instinct telling her to twist so that his target, her arse, would be out of his reach.

But she _didn’t_ twist. This would be a bit of programming that Moriarty had installed, then. Mycroft considered this new information as he continued to administer a precise, brutal spanking, the sensation-tracking parts of his brain starting to notice pleasure building within him at the feeling of her pink skin warming under his stinging palm. It was a convenient bit of training, and Mycroft no longer felt like he had to scrub every inch of his little girl in order to get the stench of her former owner off of her.

Earlier that evening, Mycroft had watched as she -- that little girl -- stripped in Moriarty’s face, showing him the surgically shaven landscape that Mycroft had had crafted between her thighs. It had been an act of pure defiance, following by mutilating his genitals and walking away from him as he howled in pain, all without breaking a sweat.

The stench of Moriarty was _gone_. Mycroft may have scrubbed her skin, but she had excised the tumor from her soul herself, with the same knife that he’d used to carve his name there. Mycroft concluded that he had no need to disassemble this or any other programming that he discovered in the future, not if it suited his own preferences, not on principle alone. After all, he’d won. And Sherlock _would_ win. He believed this.

Mycroft paused in spanking her. Her bottom was warming up nicely, and she was starting to make slightly louder grunts of effort.

These gave way to soft gasps as Mycroft began to knead and stroke her warm skin. “You like being spanked a great deal, don’t you, sweetheart? You know that I can tell.” He slipped a couple of fingers exploratively into the cleft of her thighs and buttocks, finding her slippery and making an audible _hmm_ of satisfaction.

“Yes, Daddy,” she breathed, trying not to squirm on his fingers.

“Tell me why you like it.”

She hesitated, her bum pushing up into his hand for more sensation, for more _pain_.

“It feels _so good_ , Daddy, but I don’t know how to explain it _why_ it feels so good.” She picked up momentum as she spoke. “It -- now it’s starting to hurt so badly that sometimes I think that I won’t be able to take another one without moving, and then, just then, like you can read my mind, you press your other hand down on my back, or you grab and squeeze the back of my neck, and I remember that you’re, you’re my _daddy_. My _real_ daddy. I can do anything that you want me to do. ” He couldn’t see her face, but her voice was full of emotional urgency as she tried to explain it.

He was indeed impressed. He’d asked her this question many times, and never gotten such a cogent answer. It was becoming clear that her encounter with Moriarty had indeed opened a door within her. Perhaps she _could_ grow up and still remain his. Perhaps keeping her wouldn’t have to ruin her. Perhaps Moriarty was the one who’d ruined her, and Mycroft could give her the closest thing to a normal life that she was capable of thriving within now.

 _Perhaps_ he hadn’t botched this entire bloody project. Mycroft thought back to the careful planning of the raid on Moriarty’s bolthole and the prize of securing a case-breaking asset, an asset from which he’d gleaned intelligence that had allowed him to manipulate Moriarty exactly where Mycroft and Sherlock wanted him to set up the endgame that Sherlock had outlined.

She had become his masterstoke in the entire affair, his signature on Moriarty’s death warrant at Sherlock’s hands, which he’d flashed in the maniac’s face earlier today. And here Mycroft was with a lapful of very warm, very masochistic young girl begging for him to do as he liked with her and to take care of her.

“It feels so good, darling,” he said gently, palms smoothing her stinging flesh, “because it makes you feel safe and loved and excited all at the same time when I spank you, in a way that you have never felt safe and loved and excited before.”

She tensed in momentary resistance the first time that he used that word -- loved. She’d used it earlier this evening, but he’d never used it himself before. That didn’t particularly concern him. In a moment he would feel and hear the tears -- and indeed he did. Her shoulders shook, and in response Mycroft took a tight hold of the back of her neck and began to spank her again, harder than before.

She pulled her arms in underneath herself and cried long and hard while he spanked her until his shoulder and elbow ached fiercely. He would pay for this later, and it was going to be so very worth it. He appreciated that she was making no effort to quell her tears.

His little girl. Elizabeth, now. Shaking and orgasming, he was quite certain, _twice_ , from the precision with which he made sure that her clit rubbed against his knee (the first time) and his thigh (the second).

Her body absorbed impact after impact, brutally forthright, delivered by the hands of a man who understood that she craved abuse as much as she craved love. Indeed, for Elizabeth, abuse and love were the same thing. For Mycroft, love and control were the same thing. With a brain as large as his, it was easy to figure out how to assemble that puzzle.

As she descended from the heights of that second, composure-shattering orgasm, Mycroft eased back on the intensity of the blows he was landing. When her head and feet hung limp, he switched back to massaging her bum, her back and her legs, at first with painful pressure, then easing back to a soothing touch gradually, careful not to jar her out of her afterglow. Heavy masochists sometimes felt bereft when you stopped hurting them after a lengthy beating.

As most of them did, she began to curl in on herself, and with Mycroft ready for it he was prepared to pull her back onto the bed and onto her side, and to curl his much-longer body around hers. His arm draped over her torso, his hands folded around hers, which were curled in under her chin. He let his still-shod feet hang over the footboard. The girl melted back into his embrace.

“You did very well today, sweetheart, and I’m very proud of you,” he said softly, nuzzling through the curtain of her hair to locate her ear. It warmed at his praise.

“Really, Daddy?”

“Really, Elizabeth.” He squeezed her lightly and found himself closing his eyes against his next words. He wouldn’t regret them, but he couldn’t deny that it was difficult for him to say this. “I don’t lie. Not to you. Not anymore. I promise.”

He’d previously said those words to two other human beings. The second had been his preternaturally gifted PA, Andrea, and it had been one of the best choices of his life. The first occasion did not bear remembering in detail, but it had... _not_ been a wise choice.

She seemed to sense the seriousness of the pledge he’d just made, as after a moment she wriggled in his embrace, turning onto her back in order to look up into his face from her new angle, nuzzling into the smooth fabric of his shirt in his armpit.

“You won’t lie to me anymore?” she repeated, shyly.

Mycroft stretched out, propping his elbow on the mattress and his head on the heel of his hand.

“I will not lie to you any more, Elizabeth Charlotte Holmes,” Mycroft intoned, restraining a smile.

She blinked slowly, studying him. “Okay.” She chewed the inside of her cheek, thinking a moment. “Am I still allowed to keep staying here with you for as long as I want?”

Mycroft nodded, trying not to look too self-satisfied that that had been her first question.

“And am I allowed to leave? Whenever I want?”

 _That_ soured his sense of triumph for a moment, but he didn’t let any trace of it show in his expression. She _should_ be asking exactly this question.

“After Moriarty is neutralized and confirmed dead,” he said coolly, “ _and_ after Dr. Watson and Andrea _both_ agree that you are fit to live on your own in some new habitat of your choosing… then, yes, you are free to leave.”

“Uh-huh.” He couldn’t tell, for sure, whether that had been the answer that she was expecting or not.  “If I leave, do I get to return?”

He arched one brow. “I suppose that would depend on the circumstances of your departure, wouldn’t it?”

She nodded. He could tell that she was thinking hard, wanting to make the most of this new boon that she had earned.

“Has there been anyone like… me, before, for you? I mean... a rescue, who you kept?” It sounded as if she thought of herself as a piece of evidence that Mycroft had swiped from the evidence locker. But then, she wasn’t that far off, was she?

“No, never.”

“Have you ever had another… another girl, or boy, of another kind? Maybe not a rescue, but someone who was… yours?”

He firmed his jaw. “Once, very briefly, a very long time ago, when I was still a student. It... didn’t work out, and is the reason that I haven’t had much company between then and now.”

Mycroft decided that her interview had gone far enough for now. He moved his hand across her bare stomach, dried blood flaking off under his touch, as it already had all over his trousers and his expensive down comforter.

All worth it.

“Spread your legs for me now, sweetheart,” he told her, before she could come up with another question.

Elizabeth’s eyes were wide and she blushed as she obeyed. Mycroft slid his hand down between her legs, sliding his fingers gently over the exposed nub, making her shiver. Further down, over the smooth planes where her labia had once been. His fingers circled the vestibule of her entrance. She had been a wreck of arousal all afternoon and evening, so she was slick everywhere, further down her thighs than any woman he’d ever touched.

She gasped and chewed her bottom lip, looking to him desperately for cues. He explored her lazily as he smiled down at her. “You may react to my touch freely, but other than you will lie still and pliant until I give you permission to do anything else. Do you understand, sweetheart?”

“Yes, Daddy,” she said breathily.

He constructed a working tactile map of the results of the way he’d altered her and compared it to what he’d planned. The work was excellent… the scars, now fully healed and well concealed, were still slightly red and swollen, but would slowly fade to flat silver lines in a year or two. There was a natural curvature to her geography down over her mons and around her exposed vagina, which would fill in a bit further with natural fat redistribution as she completed puberty. She was reduced to her functions, her clitoris, exposed, her urethra just visible if you knew what to look for, and her unprotected vulval vestibule. She was completely hairless, permanently so.

Having made a satisfactory inventory of her new genitals, Mycroft began to touch the rest of her, starting with a thorough exploration of her torso that skirted her breasts, to her increasing frustration and his increasing amusement. After that, he took his time updating every square millimetre of her limbs, making sure that she enjoyed every minute of the sensory attention as much as he did.

Then he rolled her over and slowly worked his way from the bottoms of her feet up to the crown of her head. She shuddered and moaned her way through the experience, her eyes fluttering open and closed at intervals, her bottom lip plumped by all of the chewing.

Mycroft worked his fingers into her thick hair and scratched lightly across her scalp, patiently searching for the spot right in the back that reliably made her toes curl… just like _that_. It wasn’t always possible to make her orgasm from this alone, but on this occasion it certainly was. It turned out to be a particularly cataclysmic event, during which he pressed the length of her shaking body into the bed with his fully-dressed weight, the long fingers of his other hand wrapped snugly around the base of her throat as she bucked violently.

She eventually came to a shuddering end, during which he continued to gently scratch her scalp and make soothing sounds with his mouth against her ear. Afterwards, he let them both lay still for a while, content. He smiled to himself when she eventually drifted off.

It was almost an hour later when he felt that it was time to resume his planned agenda. She was still mostly asleep as he rolled her back onto her back beneath him, and returned to resting his weight beside her as he stroked her skin, awakening her slowly.

Her eyelids fluttered as he finally began to skirt the rise of her breast, which got her attention quickly. She moaned, arching up.

“Lie still,” he reminded her in a barely-audible whisper, and she settled again beneath his hand. He’d touched her in all of these ways many times before, but by now she had surely figured out from his incredibly relaxed pace that he intended tonight to last for a long time, and to culminate in something worthy all of this work and build-up.

Instead of updating his internal representation of the terrain of her breasts, he simply archived and scrapped the existing one and started anew. This drew the teasing out even longer, and by the time that his fingers were anywhere near her nipple, she simply couldn’t help herself from trying to push for his attention.

He tsk-ed gently and stuck to his original plan, enjoying the way that she writhed from head to toe in her frustration. Finally it was time to re-map the stiff nubs that tightened even further the moment that he brushed one of them. Elizabeth hissed, burying her face in Mycroft’s neck. Technically it was against the rules that he’d given her but it felt so bloody good that he pulled her into him instead, encouraging her.

Ah. Her mouth came to rest against the side of his neck, the weight of her head on his shoulder, and he felt every gasp and groan as he began to experiment with her responsiveness. The truth was that he would never forget a single aspect of her physical, corporeal body for as long as he lived, but nonetheless he started at the beginning for the sheer pleasure of manipulating and cataloging her body.

He'd quickly learned that Elizabeth was so profoundly masochistic that she often found play that didn’t at least hurt at least a little bit to be frustrating, and increasingly so over time as she became more turned on. He exploited that weakness thoroughly now, tugging gently at each nipple in turn, squeezing lightly, twisting until just _before_ it would start to register as painful.

By now her mouth was open and she was panting and mewling in frustration. She lost track of herself so thoroughly that she sucked lightly at the skin on the side of his neck, an action she’d never attempted before.

Mycroft was shocked to hear a deep, urgent sound find its way out of his throat without his permission. Her unexpected mouth was hot and wet, the texture of her tongue impossibly arousing. She could not see his startled expression, but instead of pulling away Mycroft closed his eyes and pressed her head closer. At the same time he finally pinched her nipple hard enough to hurt her, bearing down on the tissue between his thumb and the side of his finger.

He shifted his weight on the bed, sliding the arm that he’d been resting his weight on under her shoulders and wrapping it around her so that he could attend to both of her nipples simultaneously. He managed to find a position where she could still nip, nuzzle and suck at the side of his neck in a way that was absolutely going to leave a great deal of evidence in its wake. He found that he could not possibly care at the moment. She was rubbing her thighs together as she pressed against him, hoping that he might roll them so that she could rub herself on his thigh.

It felt more satisfying than he could have anticipated to finally be hurting her, and he twisted her nipples hard enough to bruise the tissue deeply, pulling until she mewled in protest. He let their legs tangle together in the usual fashion, so that his thigh snugged deep into the V of her own. She twisted her torso, determined to ride his leg but also desperate for the abuse of her nipples to continue.

“Worse, please, worse,” she muttered against his neck. Not just “harder,” but “worse.” Her desperation, not merely to feel pain, but to suffer deeply at his hands was absolutely the most arousing thing that Mycroft had ever encountered in his life.

He felt her beginning to build toward another orgasm. _No, not again, not quite yet_ , he thought to himself, and he reluctantly distanced her body from his by pushing her back flat on her back on his bed and returning to his position on his side beside her.

She mewled loudly, staring up at him with hurt, wet eyes. It was absolutely as sweet as honey, and he filed her expression of exquisitely frustrated pleading in the top corner of his internal desktop for easy immediate reviewing at any time.

“Shhh, my dear. Settle down now, sweetheart. I think that you’ll like what comes next.”

Those words quelled her eventually, and she subsided, her breast still heaving with the force of her frustrations.

Mycroft took stock of them both, as well as the rumpled state of his thick down comforter and pillows. She was sweating lightly from forehead down, and her slippery juices were smeared everywhere from her stomach to knees at this point.

He shifted closer to her, pressing her against his side, and she pressed back against him welcomingly, her eyes shining up at him. Mycroft leaned in, and felt a swell of satisfaction when she sucked in a breath and froze, her eyes opening wide as she realized that he was acting as if he intended to kiss her, something he’d certainly never done before.

Mycroft traced his fingers along her bottom lip, grinning mischievously. She looked confused, but she relaxed as instead of kissing her he simply leaned in closely and watched the progress of his sensitive fingertips across every millimetre of the skin on her bottom lip.

He mapped her hairline, her ears and eyes and nose, her throat down to her shoulders and sternum. Gazes locked at so close a range, watching each other’s every micro-expression as he continued his thorough exploration of her body. His fingers traveled over her cheekbones, her brows. The line of her nose again. Her upper lip.

The intimacy was indeed intense, and he was surprised to find that no aversion at all arose in him during the experience. She was hitching and sighing with arousal, her eyes locked on his, at the mere sensation of his fingertips exploring her face.

With that, the manual tactile inventory was complete. He realized that she’d correctly anticipated his next step when he noticed her eyes flicker with increasing frequency to his mouth.

Which curved, again. Mycroft had smiled more tonight than in the last ten years of his life. He was willing to bet a month of his (considerable) salary that that was literally true.

But unimportant right now. Mycroft closed the little bit of space remaining between them, and lightly brushed the apple of her cheek with his lips.

She froze again, a little sound of pleasure in her throat nonetheless. He laid a series of butterfly kissed over the freckled bridge of her nose and onto the other cheek, and when he pulled back slightly to check her expression, he was surprised to see tears tracking down both of her cheeks.

“Oh, my dear, dear girl. My beautiful Elizabeth,” Mycroft soothed, leaning back in and beginning to kiss her tears from her cheeks. “You’re safe, now and forever, if you stay with me, and you’re mine, so you simply must. I know that you know that that’s true.”

As intended, this resulted in further tears, and Mycroft began a steady stream of verbal affection to reinforce his actions as he continued to press kisses on her face and hair.

“I will take care of you, now and forever, Elizabeth. I will give you all the pain and suffering that you need so that you never need to find it anywhere else, or from anyone untrustworthy. You know that I understand what you need better than anyone else ever could.”

It was obvious in her reactions that she found both statements equally reassuring. He slid his hand back down to her nipple, and she began to whimper as he pinched and pulled, hurting her as he continued to kiss his way across her skin, the kisses intermingled with the stream of promises that he was making to her.

He meant every bloody one of them.

“I will help you grow up strong and safe, into the best possible version of yourself that you could ever become, and I will take care of you and teach you everything that you need to know. You will sleep under my arm in a warm bed every night.”

“Thank you, Daddy, thank you, thank you,” she whispered until it was almost a chant. Mycroft’s erection throbbed even harder where it was trapped, unattended, surprised by his gratification at her worship. Offspring did indeed worship their parents, who seemed omniscient and omnipotent for many years before they learned the unfortunate truth that all beings are fallible. Even daddies.

Elizabeth’s shining eyes were not the eyes of a child who had yet considered the possibility that her adored, beloved daddy might have a flaw, and Mycroft leaned in and kissed each of her lids in turn, becoming aware that the narcissistic supply flowing from the devoted submissive and masochist beneath him was going to his head right now, dangerously so.

He felt the old heady feeling -- _I can do anything to her,_ his blood was singing with absolute certainty. Mycroft lightly kissed the corner of Elizabeth’s mouth as he twisted her left nipple viciously.

She turned her head toward him as she gasped in pain, and he swallowed the sound, taking advantage of the response he’d just elicited in order to slip the tip of his tongue along her soft lower lip.

“Daddy,” she breathed, her green eyes opening, allowing him to see just how intense her desire had become.

“He never kissed you,” Mycroft said.

“No, Daddy,” Elizabeth said, and her blush and her shyness momentarily erased all the recovery and maturation of the last months, leaving her young and terrified again.

“Than you don’t really know if you enjoy kissing or not, do you, my sweet?” he murmured.

“No, Daddy.”

“Do you like the idea of kissing?”

“ _Yes_ , Daddy. Um, very much.”

In response to this he covered her mouth and gently licked in between her parted lips, brushing her tongue with his.

Elizabeth froze, whimpering. She waited, but he didn’t make a second overture, instead returning to placing the lightest of butterfly kisses at the edge of her lip, then on her chin.

She dipped her head, mouth open. Not assuming responsibility for continuing the kiss, but putting herself exactly where she needed to be for _him_ to do so. He felt the corners of his mouth turn up as he tilted his head to the correct angle and let their lips meet.

She wasn’t frozen any more, but she was tentative. She made noises of clear pleasure when he licked into her mouth a second time, but she still didn’t reciprocate. He savored the heady tension between her intense desire and intense restraint. Masochists like her -- those who _delighted_ in obedience, in service, the ones who _glowed_ when they relaxed into knowing that someone with a strong hand had that hand on their collar -- well, they were truly rare. He’d long ago given up hope of finding one through the usual avenues. And then Moriarty had gone and done all the hard work for him.

Mycroft hadn’t kissed anyone in -- well, he knew the exact time elapsed, but he settled for “a very long time” in his head right this moment. Whenever he had before, he’d never had the usual impulse to close his eyes, though he’d sometimes consciously done so. Right now, with Elizabeth lying still and open-mouthed and trembling with excitement as he ran the tip of his tongue slowly along her upper teeth, noting every notch with the incredible number of nerve endings there, Mycroft found his eyes closing slowly of their own accord so that all of his focus was exclusively on the sensation being created by their current slow meeting of their mouths.

Kissing had never felt like this… ever. Mycroft’s body shifted lower and closer, operating on instinct, such a rarity for him. It wasn’t that she was beautiful or (too) young or nubile or submissive or masochistic or naked on his bed. It was that she was _his_.

Mycroft laid his hands on the sides of her face, his fingers splayed upward to cradle her skull in his hands, his thumbs brushing up against her lobes, and he kissed her long and properly.

He explored every millimetre of her hot, wet mouth, with the tip of his tongue, with the soft, broad flat of it. Her teeth. His teeth, clinking lightly against hers as he licked deeper into her. The ridged roof of her mouth. Her tongue, small and supple, emerging slowly as he coaxed it out amidst the tiny, desperate noises of pleasure that she was making.

This being her first kiss, and likewise the first that had ever made him feel like he’d just discovered a new and critical component of life, he continued to lead her in a leisurely dance that escalated slowly. Eventually Elizabeth began to get used to what he was doing and to how it made her feel, and she began to respond with her entire body. Her mouth was hungry and demanding, her tongue licking alongside his into his mouth.

Mycroft rolled over her, caging her with his limbs, letting his much-heavier body press down on her lightly, restrictively, completely intoxicated by evolutionary imperatives as old as his species that were pumping through his bloodstream, rushing so hard in his veins that he was certain that he could _hear_ it.

“You’re _mine_ , Elizabeth,” he growled into her hair, and she shuddered. “ _You belong to me._ ”

“I’m _yours_ , Daddy,” she agreed in a pleading voice. “Please _show_ me, Daddy. Remind your little girl that I belong to you. I need to learn that again.”

“You’re _completely_ mine,” he ground out, tightening his fingers in her hair. “You’re mine to reward, like tonight, and mine to punish. _Aren’t_ you?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

He began to tug at her nipple again, and kissed along the shell of her ear.

“You’re mine to pleasure, and mine to hurt.” He pinched the nipple that he held to underline his point, nibbling at the sensitive skin beneath her ear.

“ _Yes_ , Daddy.”

“You’re mine to protect, and mine alone to _abuse_ when it suits me.”

Her whole body jerked at the word, upon which he laid clear emphasis.

“ _Oh_ , Daddy, yes, thank you,” she breathed. “I’m sorry that I need it so much, Daddy. You shouldn’t have to hurt me unless you feel like it.”

He relinquished her nipple and palmed her entire breast, so that now as he dug his fingers and thumb into her, he started to make deeper bruises. She exhaled sharply and slowly with relief.                                                

“ _Thank you_ , Daddy.” Tears were leaking from her eyes again.

“Oh, sweetheart.” Mycroft peered down at her in mock concern. “You _still_ haven’t figured out what it was about you that made Moriarty choose you out of all of the pretty young things available along with you in that particular child mill.”

She stared up at him, blinking as she worked to comprehend his words through her haze of arousal. “No, Daddy. I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Please tell me.”

In response, Mycroft shifted his weight back onto his heels in order to gaze down at the naked, aroused girl squirming on his bed. Seeing what he expected, it was clear what to do next.

“Oh Elizabeth,” he said, fondly, and her brow wrinkled in confusion.

Instead of answering her question, he gave another order: “Turn over, please.”

She complied, and he could see on her face that she wanted to prod him about the answer to his previous question. She wasn’t letting it go. She was just obedient.

He positioned himself above her again, and reached for one of the top corners of the bed. He drew back, pulling something with him, and when he grasped her wrist and slid it into the loop and she felt it tighten and pull at her, she figured it out.

“Oh, Daddy,” she breathed as he quickly secured her, spread-eagle and prone on the bed, into a set of sturdy but soft leather cuffs, attached to points somewhere out of her line of sight. A few experimental tugs made clear that she had very little wriggle room and was _not_ going to free herself.

Mycroft settled down and went about repeating the slow mapping of her body that he had just completed with his fingertips, but this time using his tongue and lips. He started at the back of her neck, on the nape, and worked his way down her spine, kissing her, tasting her, licking her when he felt the impulse, then, after a while, biting as well. She moaned and groaned, wriggled and pulled, pushed into him or pulled away the little that she could. Fingertips to fingertips, toes to toes, Mycroft remapped the girl’s body from stem to stern with his mouth.

By her right shoulder, he had successfully distracted her -- only for the interim; he brooked no illusions -- from the question of Moriarty’s selection of her. It wasn’t exactly that Mycroft was warming her up out of consideration for her enjoyment -- she was a heavy enough masochist that she rarely needed warm up. Pain _was_ her entry point for arousal. But tonight, restrained, instructed not to act other than to react, with Mycroft happy to and able to take all the time in the world? The slow, thorough escalation that he was savoring gave her plenty of time to always crave the next increase in intensity.

It was delicious, to touch her this thoroughly, to map her this thoroughly, to tease her this thoroughly. Her body was developing faster than he’d anticipated with access to copious quantities of healthy and well-prepared food, and almost all of the weight that she was gaining was going to her breasts and hips first, only a little onto her slender young limbs. It was delicious, the growing awareness that he wasn’t always going to have to be so careful with her. That given the tools to understand herself, the right circumstances to flourish within, that she was capable of becoming something that Moriarty in his short-sighted hedonism hadn’t been wise enough to desire.

Mycroft was careful as he turned her over one more time, holding her limbs tightly as he released each and refastened it, wanting her to stay relaxed inside of the awareness that she had no choices to make about anything that occurred to her.

This time he started at her toes and worked his way up, skirting around her genitals and her breasts, working his way to her fingers and back down to her shoulders and neck before kissing and nipping his way up her long neck to her jawline.

Mycroft had her caged by his clothed limbs. She had probably imprinted on Moriarty and his love of a good suit early, and she often responded to Mycroft’s wardrobe by the desire to press her cheek and rub ever-so-lightly against him, like a cat. That was another thing that she was, he reflected during his extended worship of her restrained body. She was confiscated evidence, and she was a pet. She was learning to become -- or at least functionally emulate -- a girl, largely with Andrea’s help now. She was the heaviest sadomasochist and the most self-destructive submissive he’d ever known, and Mycroft had spent an interesting and disappointing couple of years at university exploring the question of whether a submissive lover might be worth the investment of time and energy.

She was whimpering and offering him her mouth, but Mycroft gently kissed and nuzzled his way around her ears, into her hair at scalp and hairline, across her brows and down her nose, over each eyelid and cheekbone, and back down her jawline to her chin before he gave her what she wanted again.

When he finally let himself fall forward into her, sealing his mouth over hers and plunging his tongue into her, she responded with equal fervency, and in that unlikely kiss, between one of the silent powers behind the British throne and a traumatized asset that he’d brought home from one of the most thorny security problems of his career, he realized why he felt so comfortable with Elizabeth, with the girl who had been Willow.

All animals are subject to their most primal drives, even animals as intellectual and self-aware as Mycroft Holmes. Early in his life, Mycroft had made the mistake of trying to repress them, and while the energy invested had gone a long and useful way toward his ability to manage and edit them, it had been an exercise in folly to try to entirely excise sentiment from his heart, no matter what he’d attempted to drill into his wayward little brother over the years.

For even a creature as intellectual and self-aware as Mycroft Holmes had to contend with the fact that he was driven by a hunger to understand… _everything_. That the most interesting thing in the universe was human beings, and the ability to understand and thus manipulative them effectively would furthest advance the goals that he’d settled upon for himself.

The most interesting thing in Elizabeth’s world -- in the former Willow’s world -- had also been human beings. One of the questions that Mycroft had sussed out in his months caring for his ward was whether this focused, urgent curiosity about the humans around her was purely a product of her trauma, or if it was also a facet of her temperament.

Mycroft had not proceeded with Willow’s surgical reconstruction until he’d been fairly sure that he’d retrained her central nervous system into a less overactive state. His quickly-acquired understanding of the most effective treatments for post-traumatic stress meant that having her learn to sleep under the full-body protection of the most powerful figure that she encountered, with a never-restrained option to sleep somewhere nearby but alone without punishment, had first led him to considering taking the project on himself. He’d found, over the years, that always sleeping alone was the worst part of having forsaken his habits in earlier years to attend to his body’s sexual desires.

It had all just escalated from there. He’d made absolutely no provisions for his own reactions to developing a genuine attachment to the girl, which in retrospect had been foolish. Both Andrea and Sherlock were mocking him frequently for that these days. And here they were, Mycroft lost inside of the mouth of a girl that he owned body, mind and spirit.

He tasted her curiosity. Her tongue wanted to know everything about Mycroft’s mouth, about how he kissed, about what he liked when he kissed. Her teeth wanted to know everything about him. Her eyes wanted to know everything about him.

He understood what she was feeling. It had been a very, very long time since he’d felt it too.

It wasn’t appropriate, but Sherlock was right that both Holmes brothers had sussed out that normative morality was useless to them by the time they each reached five years of age. The girl had been damaged almost beyond repair and had no understanding of what she was beneath all the layers of trauma. There was no therapist equipped to help such an intensely submissive masochist make sense of a world in which she had been selected for years of misery and suffering based exactly upon those parts of herself, and yet they were parts of her that she could not excise, that she didn’t really want to excise.

No, as Mycroft learned from the way that the newly self-minted Elizabeth kissed him back, the reason that he understood her at such a cellular level even though she did not possess the vaunted Holmes intellect, was that she was driven, driven, constantly _driven_ by a need to understand, to completely thoroughly understand, the motivations and functioning of every human being that she might encounter. On that level, they were much the same, and because he understood her so cellularly, he knew that his ability to manipulate and utilize her -- for her own good as well as his, as the two were intertwined in his mind now -- was utterly reliable.

Mycroft hadn’t consulted his internal clock for a very long time, and was stunned to realize that they had been doing nothing but kissing ardently for almost ten minutes, like teenagers on a couch. He pulled back from her, looking at her expression, and she chewed her bottom lip, staring up at him glassy-eyed.

Mycroft gave her a crooked smile and another kiss on the cheek before nuzzling his way back into the curls beneath her ear. She moaned and turned her head away, baring her throat. Mycroft took the invitation, nipping and kissing his way down her artery to her collarbone while she writhed beneath him in appreciation.

Her collarbones were incredibly responsive to his mouth, and her nipples began to crinkle long before he was mouthing her breasts. He worked his way around their undersides, across her ribs, up to where the curve reversed into the hollow under her arm, along the line of her sternum. She was whimpering freely, but had given up on begging him for more or to hurry hours ago.

His fingers played with her other nipple as he finally closed his mouth over the one he was teasing. He sucked, at first lightly, for long enough for her to understand the new sensation, and then hungrily, aggressively.

Her whimpers had evolved into an ongoing chorus of desire. She’d been aroused for -- well, most of the day, if one counted how wet she’d been after maiming Moriarty, and for four hours straight if one merely started with their arrival home at Pall Mall. Now, she was bound spread-eagle, with Mycroft’s teeth at one breast and his hand at the other. This he continued until both of her nipples were thoroughly red and bruised, sensitive to anything else that was coming, then he slid his free hand down her body to the new landscape between her thighs.

The onslaught of stimulation was intense, so intense that she began to cry, sobbing loudly for him to stop. Mycroft knew that at the moment -- one of his hands buried in her hair and tugging, a swollen nipple grasped firmly between his teeth as he sucked, his fingers sliding in and out of her beautiful, simple new cunt, that she wasn’t even exactly in _pain_. She was just overwhelmed.

Overwhelmed didn’t matter to him, and he saw no reason not to push her over the top. Instead of backing off, Mycroft licked his way to her other nipple and drew it up more hungrily than ever, his teeth scraping over the pink flesh of her areola. He was pushing three fingers into her body, and his thumb slid from one side to the other of her exposed clitoris, pressing down from an oblique angle but not quite direct enough to bring her off. She was bucking violently in her bonds, truly and completely out of control of herself for the first time that he had ever seen as she begged him through her tears and snot to stop. To continue. She didn’t know.

Instead he moved gradually down, leaving a wide stripe of saliva over the heaving topography of her ribs and stomach until he latched onto her altered anatomy and, after using his tongue to re-explore every millimetre that he’d paid for, he began to alternate between spreading her thighs and sliding his tongue deep inside of one or the other of her holes, and sucking lightly on her swollen clitoris, stopping repeatedly just before she orgasmed.

At this point he had pushed her far beyond being verbal, though there were occasional words and syllables mixed into the garbled pleas and sounds that he was wringing out of her. Both hands were now on her nipples as he sucked hard at her clit, then after pulling her back from pushing up against the point of inevitability, he settled into to laving and mouthing her hole and mons and thighs.

She was alternating now between periods of near inactivity, only able to twitch as he sucked or bit her in particularly effective ways, and incoherent garbling and straining against the cuffs. Right where he wanted her, confused and exhausted and wrung out. Mycroft moved both of his hands to her hips, gripping her firmly and holding her down against the mattress, and he put his mouth over her clit again, licking at her vigorously before he began to suck strongly and without relent.

She orgasmed twenty seconds later, then again three minutes later, and a sixth time two minutes after that. Or, she moved through one long orgasm that waned and waxed several times before it resolved. As she was finally finished coming, Mycroft relinquished the careful hold that he had on her clit with his teeth and moved swiftly to free her from all four cuffs.

Of course she curled up on the bed and he curled around her again, wrapping his arms around her, savoring the extended, shuddering, whimpering aftermath of her climax.  She subsided slowly, her breathing evening out, her limbs relaxing. This time, though, he knew that she was not about to doze off. No, she may be tired and sated and pliant, but there was still a thread of humming, anticipatory tension running through her exhaustion.

This was the particular way in which she was so exquisitely sensitive, so of course she already knew. She’d received one of the rewards for which she asked, and it was time to give her the reward that he’d selected for her. Happily for them both, there was significant overlap in the matters. They both needed what came next.

Mycroft unwrapped himself from around her and rose from the bed slowly, so that it didn’t feel like a rejection or a shift in mood. Elizabeth uncurled and rolled onto her back, watching him, and he gave her a small smile as he moved to the armchair beside the wardrobe and sat down there.

She followed him, sliding off the bed onto her hands and knees and crawling to him across the carpet. Their gazes were locked as she approached, and Mycroft slowly unfastened the fly of his trousers and pushed them down partway in invitation.

Her eyes shone with excitement as she crawled between his legs and reached for him, pushing fabric and zipper out of her way, reaching into his silk briefs and drawing his aching, throbbing erection out into the open. Her soft, small fingers wrapping around his girth made his breath catch in his chest, and Mycroft let his head fall back, watching her from under slitted lids. He relaxed his hands on the arms of his chair, his body language making clear that it was her turn to do as she liked.

Apparently she liked touching him.

She stroked him, her touch alternating between firm and teasing so that he was never quite certain what sensation would occur next. She swirled a fingertip around his leaking slit, spreading his pre-ejaculate over the swollen purple head of his cock. She wrapped her fingers around his shaft and pumped slowly, pulled the skin with her as she went, creating an unbelievably delicious friction that made Mycroft growl. His hips jerked in the chair.

“Will you please fuck my mouth tonight, Daddy?” Elizabeth asked in her most convincing little girl voice, and given her actual age, that was quite a convincing voice indeed. The wrongness and hotness of it made the hairs on the back of his arms stand up, his scrotum tighten.

“Yes, darling. Of course. I’m going to fuck your mouth and your throat.”

She gasped with pleasure, and surged forward to take him into her mouth, pushing herself further forward as the head of his cock slid toward the back of her palate, continuing until he was buried in her throat and her nose was nestled into his pubic hair, brushing his groin.

None of the lovers of his youth had ever engulfed him so completely and so _hungrily,_  and Mycroft felt himself jerk upward again. She made a wet choking sound but she didn’t pull back, and the continued vise-like grip of the muscles around her larynx on the head of his cock made him wonder wildly if he was about to orgasm prematurely. She seemed desperate to devour him, and it was this demeanor as much as the unexpected intensity of her technique that nearly pushed him over the edge against his will.

He wrapped his fingers tightly in her curls and yanked her mouth off of him, panting and closing his eyes tightly as he fought to regain his composure. When he opened his eyes she was watching him, obviously delighting in the reaction that she’d achieved, grinning in an impish manner that suggested a whole new side of her that he’d not yet seen.

He found himself grinning back. The truth was, she’d almost gotten him.

“Well played, little one. You’re going to get the treat that you crave, I promise, but not quite that easily. Now, you may begin again.”

He relinquished his hold on her and returned his hands to the arms of his chair, letting his head fall back again. This time he let his eyes close all the way, and he was ready for the extraordinary, wet heat of her _very_ clever little mouth.

He was in heaven.

Mycroft sank into it. Her hands rested lightly on the tops of his thighs, and her mouth enveloped him over and over, her tongue tracing the underside of his sensitive corona, then downward along his shaft before enthusiastically mouthing each of his testicles. Her technique was wet and messy and felt unbelievably good, and the obscene sounds coming from her throat and from the meeting of her mouth and his cock would have disgusted him in any other context, but at the moment they made him certain that his brain, spine and groin were all certainly about to explode from an excess of euphoric, giddy pleasure.

She was _good_.

And she was taking her time, drawing it out. Mycroft had been in a varying states of tumescence for several hours now as he beat her and worshipped her body and pleasured her over and over, and he would not have been disappointed had she simply swiftly brought him to completion followed by passing out for the night with her in his arms.

That was not how this was going to end.

Every so often her disorienting array of techniques and surprises began to push Mycroft near to the cliff of orgasmic inevitability. Every time she read it immediately in the muscles of his thighs, and altered what she was doing so as to ramp up the teasing while withdrawing the firmer stimulation that could have finished him off. Then she began again, pushing, pushing, pushing until he felt the first urge to move his hands from the chair to the back of her head, and then, tauntingly, pulling back, so that he pushed forward in the chair, seeking her mouth.

He heard her giggle, and his last thought before he surrendered the last of his self-conscious processes and relinquished all of his internal awareness to the tidal wave of sensation in his body was that the girl had finally managed to strip him of his dignity despite his very best intentions.

And he didn’t care. Not at all. Not if it meant getting to feel like _this_.

Mycroft melted into the chair, aware that there was hair tangled between his fingers even though he’d never decided to let go of the arms of his chair, aware that he had voluntarily surrendered to a completely animal state that left him little smarter than any of the goldfish populating the world around him… and the experience was absolute _bliss_. He thrust hard into her mouth, aware that obscenities were tumbling out of his mouth in several languages and he had no idea what they were. As he began to take control of the situation her mouth went soft and pliant and she did her best to follow wherever he forced her head with his now-painful grip in her hair.

He had no idea how much time passed as he forced himself further and further down her tiring throat, her saliva and increasingly bile stringing from her lips to his groin every time that he yanked her free of him in order to press his cock against her lips and allow her to kiss and lick hungrily at it. She had let herself go when she felt him do it, and she instinctively switched from almost ferally cock-hungry to passive and pliant based on how he was using her.

Eventually he knew that he needed to finish it, for both of their sakes. She was exhausted but out of her mind with excitement at finally getting to both earn and witness his orgasm, and he was disintegrating cognitively before the increasingly overwhelming _need_ to come inside of his little girl for the first time. Mycroft’s grip in her hair tightened until he felt the first few follicles give way, and he pushed her head down hard, forcing himself so far down her throat that he felt her lower teeth scrape along the sensitive skin of his scrotum.

There was the briefest half-second between when his whole body stiffened and he pushed her head down and when he finally started to orgasm, and for that half-second the entire world was caught in a state of unbearably perfect, cataclysmic limbo. There was a loud roaring in his ears, and he felt the girl frozen and trembling on his cock, desperate for --

Mycroft orgasmed, ejaculating deep in her throat and holding her there, vaguely aware that with her experience there was no danger of her allowing herself to accidentally aspirate. She was choking, certainly, the spasms of her throat milking his ongoing pleasure from him, and he heard himself crying out inarticulately as she began to push on his thighs, finally beginning to panic over not being able to get any oxygen.

He released his grip on her hair, but to his surprise instead of pulling away and gasping for air, Elizabeth relaxed into him and began to breath in around her mouthful of suddenly ultra-sensitive cock. Her self-control was admirable, as she began to suckle his softening erection very gently as soon as she’d gotten her breathing back under control, and Mycroft shuddered as his body went into a new wave of aftershocks in response to the subtle stimulation in spite of the fact that there was nothing left to ejaculate.

Part of him thought that he ought to stop her, but he honestly didn’t know if he could. There was something about what she was doing that was preventing him from gathering his wits in any meaningful way, and all he could do was remain bonelessly collapsed in his chair with the girl comfortably cuddled between his spread thighs, his flaccid but still somehow responsive member remaining nestled in the soft, wet heat of her mouth.

He closed his eyes, fingers carding through her curls, as his limbs and spine still gave the occasional twitch. It didn’t seem to bother her, and every so often she sucked him gently again for a few seconds before relaxing to breathe around him as she drifted off.

Some time later, Mycroft came back to full awareness in the darkened room, still with Elizabeth somehow wrapped around his legs and now snoring softly in spite of the fact that she’d somehow still not relinquished her mouthful. He found himself smiling down at the top of her head, and he stroked her cheek.

She snuffled and finally let him go with a soft plop. He couldn’t see her, but he could tell from the tension in her muscles now that she was awake.

“Daddy --”

“You know the answer.”

There was a long silence.

“I… do?”

“Why Moriarty chose you? Think about it, Elizabeth. Tell me what you learned about yourself today.”

There was another long silence, but he knew that she was thinking hard. Applying the lessons that he’d been teaching her on the weeks when he had the time to tutor her directly. Thinking about tonight through the lense of Mycroft’s inevitable multiple agendas. Mycroft had never done anything in his life without having at least three different motivations, as he prized both efficiency and multitasking to the point of fetishism. She had figured this out by now, he knew.

“I learned… that my love of submission runs much deeper than it was safe to admit to myself when I was with -- him.”

“Yes.”

“And my masochism as well. You wanted me to figure out --” Here she paused, thinking. “You wanted me to understand that he -- that yes, he saw those things in me, when I was little. He was that good, and those things _are_ why he chose me. But that doesn’t mean that the way to stay safe now is to stop being submissive or masochistic.”

“Would such a thing be possible?” he wondered.

“No.” Her voice was certain on that. There was another long pause, but he didn’t need to prod her on. She was going to get there.

“And -- and I think that that is why sending me to a psychologist to fix me probably wouldn’t have worked. Most of them would -- would probably presume that my ongoing submission and masochism were _because_ of the trauma I’d suffered, that they should go away if I -- if I healed. They wouldn’t have been able to help me make sense of what I still want and still like in a world where -- where I’m supposed to be _free_ of pain and happy about it.”

“Excellent work, dear.” He lazily stroked her upper arm and breathed in the smell of her. “And now that you’ve passed the exam with flying colors and earned not one, but two rewards, I think it is time to bid adieu to this very long but very productive day, and retreat to the warmth of the bed.”

“Yes, Daddy.” She released her hold on him, and crawled across the floor and into the bed where he held up the sheet. In the dark he swiftly divested himself of his waistcoast, trousers and shirt, and on a whim he crawled in beside her in his pants instead of donning a pair of pyjamas.

Elizabeth made a surprised, sleepy sound of satisfaction as she pressed in under his arm in her usual place, but this time found bare skin.

“Good night, Daddy,” she mumbled into his armpit, throwing her top leg over his and hooking her foot around his knee possessively.

“Good night, my darling girl,” he rumbled in response, burying his nose in her curls.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My most sincere apologies for the incredible lag on this final chapter. (There is an epilogue coming, but it will probably not be very long.) As a reward for your considerable patience, I give you a 15K word chapter!
> 
> I actually wrote a draft of this half a year ago, and I just couldn't bring myself to publish it because I was simply not happy with it. I woke up two weeks ago from a shitty night's sleep with the fixes to all of the chapter's problems clear as crystal in my mind, and somehow yesterday I found myself writing the last words of the rewritten last chapter. Now I'm really quite happy with it, and excited to get the epilogue done and have my third fanfic novel be complete!


	11. Epilogue

Sherlock and John had settled into the living room, each of them nursing one of Mrs. Holmes’ festive Christmas cocktails as they waited for the day’s only interesting event to occur.

“He’s actually bringing her here?” John asked in a low voice, which was unnecessary. He could have shouted and Sherlock’s parents wouldn’t have heard him from the kitchen.

Sherlock arched a brow. “Elizabeth is Mycroft’s daughter. Bringing her to family Christmas seems apropos to me.”

“Yeah, but Sherlock.” John glanced toward the door. “You and I both know that she’s not _really_ his daughter.”

Sherlock picked up a book from the end table and opened it somewhere in the middle, making a show of ignoring John. He spoke distractedly: “Of course she is his daughter. He’s got the birth certificate to prove it, he works quite hard to care for her, and she even calls him Daddy. I should think that she would know.”

John narrowed his eyes. “Yes, all that, _and_ he engages in S &M and sex with her in spite of the fact that we both know that she’s nowhere near of age yet.”

Sherlock didn’t bat an eye. “No. No real sex, I mean. Oral, perhaps. But I’m quite sure he’s not had vaginal or anal intercourse with her.”

“I… really didn’t need to know that. But point made, anyway. Oral sex is not something that a father does with his daughter, is it? The daddy/daughter thing is just a, a _cover_ story.”

Sherlock raised his eyes from his book and leveled his gaze at John. “John, listen to me. Mycroft is attempting to explain his relationship with Elizabeth to our parents in a manner that will be comprehensible and edifying for all involved, and that hopefully will not set them up for future misunderstandings. The ‘daddy/daughter’ thing is _not_ a cover; it would be better if you thought of it as… accurate but incomplete.”

“Boys!” came the call from the kitchen and Sherlock’s mother.

“Fatty’s arrived,” Sherlock mumbled under his breath, and where normally he wouldn’t be caught dead rushing to his feet to greet his brother, under the circumstances even Sherlock rose and made his way to the foyer promptly. From there came the noises that accompanied a Christmas arrival. John trailed after Sherlock toward the commotion to find Mycroft helping Elizabeth out of a dark blue peacoat. Her hair had been cut into a modern bob which she wore tousled. Her face, though filling out, was still delicate and pale, so the confidence of her hairstyle and clothes along with her new body language gave her a great deal more presence than she’d previously had.

“Mummy, Daddy, this is your new granddaughter as of two weeks ago, Elizabeth Holmes. Sweetheart, please meet --”

Mrs. Holmes swept in and enveloped the girl. “We don’t stand on formal introductions with family, dear,” she chided lightly, kissing the girl’s forehead like a little girl in spite of the fact that she stood almost as tall as her new grandmother. John winced, craning for a glimpse of Elizabeth’s face and imagining that this much commotion and touch was going to trigger her. But no, she looked determined. In fact, he saw a wet sheen in her eyes, and realized what it must mean to her to spend a holiday -- her first ever? -- with family, safe and sound and fed and cared for.

John glanced past her and noted Mycroft watching him with a satisfied look. Suddenly everything made sense. Mycroft hated family holidays as much as Sherlock did -- well, he hated all holidays as much as Sherlock did -- and yet here he was, with a moss green and maroon checked cravat knotted jauntily about his neck and wearing a small smile that John thought just might be genuine for once.

Mrs. Holmes ushered the family through greetings and cocktails and straight to the table, where John found himself in front of a large plate piled high with food. John smiled when he noticed that the girl began to tuck in as if she were still starving, shoveling down the first few mouthfuls of food without adequate time between them, but that a light touch from Mycroft on her wrist slowed her.

“Elizabeth, honey, Mike has been quite evasive about telling us where you’ve come from.”

“I told you that it wasn’t my story to share, Mummy,” Mycroft reminded her.  John and Sherlock exchanged glances, and John could see that Sherlock was considering how to change the subject.

“It’s okay, Daddy,” Elizabeth said calmly, cutting through the tension at the table. “Mycroft rescued me from a man who kept me in a closet for three years and tortured me. Before him, I lived in a huge house with other girls crammed into bunk beds everywhere. We sewed or were taken places in buses to do menial work around the city. So the truth is that everything about my life before Mycroft found me is really depressing.”

Sherlock’s mother had put down her fork and was staring with wide eyes. “Oh, honey, _no_. Mikey didn’t tell me any of that. How horrible. I can’t _imagine_.”

Elizabeth smiled crookedly. “It’s okay. Please don’t try to imagine it. I mean, it’s not okay, but it’s over now, and I never have to go back... because of Mycroft.” She cast an adoring look at him, and she truly did look for all the world like a besotted daddy’s girl.

John heard Sherlock made a soft scoffing noise, but upon glancing over he also saw that his flatmate’s mouth had turned up on one side.

“We’ve always been very proud of Mike, and known that his work helps people and keeps us safe, but your story is… well. I’m very glad that he found you, and we could not possibly be more delighted to welcome our first official grandchild to the family. Will you be going to school, dear?”

“No. I’ve never been around normal kids. Father is supervising my education himself.”

“An education customized for you by Mycroft Holmes? I think you’ll find that quite rewarding. Don’t you agree, Sherlock?” Mrs. Holmes smiled at her younger son.

John saw Sherlock take a breath to respond sarcastically, and then he noticed that Elizabeth was watching him levelly, clearly waiting to take his measure. To John’s surprise, Sherlock shut his mouth, glanced at Mycroft, then at his parents, and finally at John.

“I’d love to take a dig at my brother, but the truth is that the registrars of Cambridge and Oxford could not possibly tailor for you a more effective education than your father, Elizabeth. I’m sure he has a comprehensive list of your areas of promise already.”

“Elizabeth has quite an unexplored aptitude for maths and strategy, possibly even a head for statistics. I look forwarding to beginning to tutor her in that area.”

Sherlock made a bit of a goody-two-shoes mockery face behind Mycroft’s back as he spoke, mostly for Elizabeth and John’s benefit. John suppressed a giggle and Elizabeth looked down, blushing with quirking lips, causing Mycroft to shoot Sherlock a dirty look.

“Must you behave like a child? I swear, the youngest person at table is two decades younger than you but acts with more decorum.”

“That’s because her father is a _fuddy-duddy_ , Mycroft. And he’s trying to raise her to be one as well, but her Uncle Sherlock and Uncle John are here to rescue her from all that on Christmas.”

“What a relief. I’ll cancel the call for military backup then, since everything is going so swimmingly at that end of the table.”

“I bet he’s teaching you table manners at home, isn’t he, my dear niece? No elbows at the table at chez Holmes-Pall Mall?”

Mycroft opened his mouth, but Elizabeth cut him off. “I help Father prepare dinner every night that I can. Why would I disrespect the meal that we worked on so hard with poor table manners? He doesn’t have to badger me into it.”

Mycroft looked satisfied and popped a forkful of roast into his mouth, chewing.

“You two,” said Mrs. Holmes. “You must stop all that now that Elizabeth and John are here. You’ll have to begin behaving like proper brothers now, to set a good example.”

“Mummy, can’t you see that she’s still encased in the pupal cocoon of adolescence and yet Mycroft is already beginning to ruin her? We need to do something dramatic. He’s going to make her all prim and joyless, like him.”

Elizabeth grinned down the table. “Oh yeah? Would you like me to prove you wrong, _‘Uncle’_ Sherlock?”

Sherlock sat up, eyes sparkling. “Yes, yes I would. What did you have in mind, dear niece?”

“Father let me bring my XBox and says I don’t have any screen time limits on holidays. And he says that you slay at Call of Duty, but _you_ haven’t seen _me_ play Call of Duty.”

Sherlock suddenly had an air of glee about him. “Call of Duty marathon tournament, Christmas edition! Yes, I am absolutely in. So are you, John. John’s an actual sniper.”

“Sherlock, stop it. I am not.”

“Well, you could be. Remember the night --”

“ _Stop_.” John glanced around the table apologetically.

“Right.” Sherlock moved some potatoes into his mouth, then spoke around them. “Anyway, you’re going to be better than some slip of a girl.”

Elizabeth narrowed her eyes. “I think you’ve forgotten something, dear uncle.”

“Oh? What is that?”

“I learned to play Call of Duty from _James Moriarty_.”

Sherlock grinned widely and rubbed his hands together. “It _is_ Christmas!”

* * *

It was many hours later, after much screaming and cursing by multiple parties, that Mycroft Holmes was settled into an armchair by the fire. A food and violence-sated Elizabeth had curled up in his lap un-self-consciously, pressing her head into his hand, and John saw Mycroft smile down and press his nose into her curls..

John glanced back at the couch to see that Mr. and Mrs. Holmes were also watching their eldest son hold his adopted daughter, and for a moment John tried to see it through their eyes. He attempted to strip away what he knew -- and wished he did not -- about what happened between Mycroft’s very fancy sheets at night.

He saw Mycroft Holmes, dubbed the Ice Man by the civilized world’s foremost psychopath, cradling a little girl in his lap as she snuggled into the one place on earth where she felt safe, and the peace and joy that it seemed to bring him to be able to have something worth protecting. What did that look like through the eyes of his mother and father, who had created him and brought him into the world, who had dealt with his soiled diapers and his throw up and the personal hell of his puberty? Had it saddened them to watch the child Mycroft build up his armor against the world, or had he just been born cold? Did they notice the change the day that he concluded that caring was not an advantage and began to attempt to teach his little brother the same thing? Now that John saw the way that Mycroft behaved with Elizabeth in the safety of his family home, he wondered if a heart lay beneath those tailored waistcoats after all, and if Mr. and Mrs. Holmes were witnessing its return.

“I know I can trust you with my secrets, John. You would never betray Sherlock’s brother unless it were the only way to protect Sherlock, and I don’t ever intend to allow that scenario to come to pass. You and I both want Sherlock safe, dying at a ripe old age having retired to the Sussex Downs to tend bees or somesuch nonsense.” Mycroft’s voice was pitched low, so that his parents would not hear, and when John looked over he saw the girl was peering up at him from her place against Mycroft’s chest.

John gave him a tired smile. “We are indeed family, Mycroft. I can’t say that I understand what works for you, but Sherlock’s made his position on the matter exceedingly clear and I fully concede that Elizabeth is thriving in your care. In fact, I’m starting to wonder if even _you_ are developing a pulse.”

Mycroft made a scoffing noise, but John could have sworn that he saw Elizabeth grinning beneath the curtain of her hair where Mycroft could not have seen. He suppressed a smile.

“I could have had her debriefed and then turned her over to the care of the foster system. You know her history, and you’ve seen that system at work in your work as a GP. Do you genuinely believe that she would have been better off?”

John couldn’t honestly say yes to that, but wasn’t willing to say no, so he said nothing.

“Additionally,” Mycroft continued, “have you fully considered the potential sensitivity of some of the intelligence that she possesses?”

“No. I guess I never thought about that. I think as her doctor, about her actual welfare.”

“I understand that you have a very certain perspective about that. I have to consider quite a few other things, but I ask you this: what do you think the implications for her personal _welfare_ might have been had I cut her loose in the foster system possessing that information? Do you think there’s any chance James Moriarty might have come looking for her, and possibly found her?”

“Okay, fine, I see your point, Mycroft. That doesn’t make your methods acceptable.”

Mycroft sighed. “You know, John, I understand that this sounds cold-blooded to you and to most decent humans, but the honest truth as we sit here on Christmas night in the bosom of my family, drunk and maudlin, is that I’m interested in whatever gets the job done, efficiently and with the least fuss.”

John smiled and shook his head, looking at the bottom of the tumbler that he still held in his lap. “You Holmes boys. You know that you’re more alike than you think.”

“I know that. Sherlock does not. Please don’t disabuse him of it; no good will come of it.”

Her giggle reminded John that one of the subjects of their conversation was right there with them. “What do you think about all this, Elizabeth? I see that you’ve developed a voice in the last few months. And an impressive vocabulary of curse words in several different languages.”

She shot a glance over at Mycroft’s parents, who were clearly absorbed in their own gossip over on the couch.

“They’re not listening. Please answer John freely, dear,” Mycroft said.

Elizabeth sat up a bit in Mycroft’s lap, shaking her hair back from her face, though her arm was still twined around his neck possessively. “I think I needed someone to take care of me. I think Andrea might have gotten me through but she didn’t need company.”

“Andrea?”

John saw Mycroft fight a smirk. “Anthea, John.”

Elizabeth shook her head. “Anyway, I needed someone to take care of me,” she persisted, “but I don’t think that _you_ were offering?”

John winced, but at the same time it did his heart good to see her willing to throw a jab on her own behalf. She truly had come a long way from the first night that John met her.

“No, I don’t suppose I was.”

“Well, then.” She looked at John expectantly.

He laughed weakly and shrugged. “Look, both of you, and Sherlock from around the corner where he’s certainly eavesdropping on us, I’ve already promised to stay out of your way and to provide Elizabeth’s medical care. What do you want from me, my blessing on an engraved card?”

Mycroft sighed in amusement. “All right, John. You have a point there, I suppose. Sherlock has never brought home a... friend who was privy to our family secrets before you, but it’s not as if I don’t agree with his instincts where you’re concerned.”

“Do you mean that you definitely won’t try to take me away from Daddy?” Elizabeth asked John, her arms tightening around Mycroft.

Mycroft squeezed her back. “Hush, dear, I already told you that John won’t do that.”

“Have you been worried about that, Wi -- Elizabeth?” John asked, troubled.

“Yes. Since you got upset about the first bite.”

John turned that over as best he could. “Okay -- well. Elizabeth, let me promise you that I won’t ever try to take you away from Mycroft unless I believe that you are doing poorly in his care and I have Sherlock as an ally in the matter. Would that set your mind at ease?”

She frowned at him. “You could just promise that you’ll never do it ever.” Mycroft looked away, blank-faced as he listened.

John took a breath. “Okay. Well, what if Mycroft got badly burned out by the stress of the responsibility of what he does and then he snapped, and took it out on you, and Sherlock and I could see that? Are you asking me to promise you that I wouldn’t step in to protect you, the way that no one ever stepped in to protect you from that lunatic who hurt you?”

John saw Mycroft’s brow knit.

“That’s really different,” Elizabeth said, looking hurt.

“In some ways,” said Mycroft softly, “but in other ways it’s not _so_ different, is it truly?”

“But it would never _happen_ ,” she protested, looking up at him. She meant to continue, but Mycroft put a finger to her lips and she subsided, pressing her face back against his chest.

“In actuality, John’s question is such a valid one that I intend to take its answer out of your hands. The truth is, John, that everyone who assumes the sort of responsibilities for another person that I’ve accepted for Elizabeth ought to be willing to consider their own weaknesses and how they may compromise their ability to follow through. You and Sherlock together, I believe, do actually provide the perfect set of checks and balances on me with regards to Elizabeth’s care. It _is_ actually my desire that you both promise me that should you both come to agreement that I’m not acting in her best interests and she is doing poorly in my care, that you will intervene as you see fit. I once offered you that as a veto -- today I’d like to upgrade that veto to a promise from you. I’m essentially asking you and Sherlock to be Elizabeth’s godparents in any event where I’m no longer the best person to care for her.”

“Huh.” John looked stunned. “Yeah, of course.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to think about it? Talk it over with Sherlock?”

John shrugged. “What’s to discuss? Can you imagine me saying no? Or Sherlock? You know how fond he’s grown of Elizabeth, don’t you?” He raised his voice slightly. “You _could_ speak for yourself, you prat.”

Elizabeth looked up at Mycroft in alarm. “I’d go live -- with John --”

“With John and Sherlock, able to go on seeing my parents regularly. I’m sure Andrea would visit frequently as well. She feels quite responsible for you, and isn’t shy about letting me know it. It would be family, Elizabeth, and the only people that you know. Can you think of a better alternative?”

She put her head back down sulkily. “It won’t happen.”

“Anything can happen, darling. It’s better to be a realist about that. Then John, you’re absolutely --”

“ _Stop_ , Mycroft. Yes. Sherlock and I will take care of her. Please list us as her godparents, on whatever paperwork you deem appropriate.”

“Well, thank you, John. I appreciate it greatly.”

John cocked an eyebrow at him. “It’s what family’s for, Mycroft.” With that, he gave Mycroft’s knee an over-familiar pat and got up and wandered off to confront Sherlock.

“I knew you were here --”

“I just came in from the loo --”

He heard their voices recede into the kitchen.

“Can we go home soon, Daddy?” Elizabeth whispered against the side of his neck.

“Yes, sweetheart, we can go home very soon.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, if anyone would like to nominate a different console platform/competitive first-person shooter game than XBox/Call of Duty, I welcome all ideas. This is really not my area.
> 
> * * *
> 
> I wrote Recognition so many years ago that I hardly remember the process, but I certainly remember that it was fun. At the time Harry Potter was opening up the fanfiction world in a new way to many people, including me, and I had a lot of readers back then. (Hi, those of you who are still with me all these years later!) And I learned a _lot_ about writing.
> 
> No More Than You was even more fun, composed as it was with ongoing reactions and input from a small but very dedicated band of Enthusiastic Readers. (Hi again!) With it, I even managed to woo my complicated ex-girlfriend back into my life as my muse and so much more. (Don't ask; San Francisco relationships are complicated.)
> 
> I can’t say that writing Heavy Petting has exactly been fun. Writing Heavy Petting has, appropriately enough I suppose, been heavy. Difficult. At moments, very difficult. But it's also been god damned satisfying.
> 
> I’ve learned over the fifteen years since I wrote Recognition largely on a whim to interrogate my own drive and desire to write fiction. I’ve also noticed that what I’m driven to write over and over has turned out to be extremely graphic erotic fiction that addresses issues of trauma, power, violence, and abuse at their intersection with early sexuality.
> 
> Huh, what a shock.
> 
> Heavy Petting has in many ways been the culmination of my decades-long writing process about trauma and early sex, though I expect the same themes may continue to show up in my writing for the rest of my life. This here is a story that I could not have written any earlier in my own process of coming to terms with early extreme sexual violence.
> 
> This story has been born out of my bone-deep, hard-won conviction that no one can assume that anyone else will be there to protect them in the moments that they need it the most, or to protect the people who need it the most. As a mother, as a psychologist, as a Buddhist, as a writer, and as a human being, I feel unable to ignore this terrible reality, and it comforts me to know that I am confronting it head on. Writing Heavy Petting has been me coming to terms with relinquishing the fantasy by indulging it deeply one last time.
> 
> Like Elizabeth-nee-Willow, I experienced sexual violence beginning when I was too young to make sense of it, I experienced it repeatedly, and I experienced it at the hands of a manipulative sadist. (Sadly, not James Moriarty.) The other details are, of course, wildly divergent. But quite a few other survivors of sexual trauma reached out to me privately as I was writing this story, expressing how much it meant to them to see an accurate (for some of us) depiction of the particular ways that that sort of experience can change us inside.
> 
> This story is about my childhood sexual trauma at the hands of a sadist, and it’s also about what I’ve learned about continuing to live, sometimes with post-traumatic stress, as a woman who is still a heavily submissive masochist. I don’t think this is a particularly realistic story, and I look to you-the-readers to tell me how well I’ve done at keeping a character from Victorian London “in character” for my very smutty version of Pygmalian. But it is a meaningful story, for me anyway.
> 
> Considering how much I torment my characters, I have so far caved to the pressure to give them (my fucked up version of) happy endings… Hermione, Rogue (well, that one may have been a little _grey_ depending on your point of view), poor poor Willow. I’ve simply felt like they deserved them, and that I haven’t yet been hardened enough by the world to deny them. But this time, I have to say, it was fully and completely on-purpose.
> 
> Mycroft and, honestly, more importantly, Elizabeth, got a happy ending here, and while it’s childish, I also think it’s important. For me, right now, anyway. After watching the Weinsteins and Spaceys and Cosbys of the world begin to fall from grace… after writing my revenge porn fantasy of Moriarty (the ultimate creep) having his most intimate victim mutilate him with his own fucking pocketknife… I thought, just this once, let’s give the girl get the happy ending that she wants for herself.
> 
> After all, the world so rarely gives it to her.


End file.
